Climate: Rescind giant to subsidies oil producers – Santa Cruz Sentinel

The Sentinel has reported on the latest Presidential Disaster Declaration encompassing Santa Cruz County following our winter storms’ damage estimated at $7.4 million. FEMA concurred with about $1.3 million. Those affected know reimbursements for past disasters have been overnight slow and inadequate.

While grateful for the declaration, I keep thinking about how else we could be spending our dollars if we had put them much earlier into climate smart mitigation infrastructure that would have reduced the pace and degree of warming our atmosphere, reducing the volatility and intensity of the climate warming effects we now must pay for in herds. I wonder why we are still paying gigantic subsidies to the extraordinarily profitable oil producers worldwide — $5.9 trillion in 2020 and going to $7.4 trillion in 2025 — and then scramble to repair the resulting damages in our communities? In January 2024 Environment California and a coalition of 70+ groups wrote to Gov. Newsom state reps asking for those to be rescinded. As individuals, let’s do that too.

— Lynda Marin, Santa Cruz

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