“Xcel Energy is dedicating a bigger share of its Minnesota solar incentives to lower-income customers in response to a new state law….”

The story is HERE, at Energy News.

One of the foundational questions that environmentalists are always asked is, “Why should anyone care about climate change?  After all, the Earth will just be warmer and isn’t that a good thing?”

Here are several very basic reasons why we should all care:

Climate Change….

• Is causing glaciers and ice to melt, raising sea levels. Water expands as it warms, causing oceans to swell in size. This water needs to go somewhere and that place will be the land we live on, causing millions of climate change refugees.

• Makes severe weather worse including heat waves, excess precipitation, and overly energetic hurricanes and tropical storms. Think of droughts being worse than before, record amounts of snow and devastation to cities torn apart by tornadoes and hurricanes.

• Creates food shortages. Weather changes will cause food and water shortages. When heavy rains and tropical storms flood our farmland, crops and livestock can’t survive. And when droughts and heat waves last longer, are hotter and are more frequent, those plants and animals lack the water they need. Climate change also threatens to disrupt the global food supply. Severe weather events can keep cargo ships from crossing the ocean, and floods and wildfires can cut off road and rail networks. Even if we can produce enough food, if we can’t transport it to the people that need it, it won’t do us any good.

• Is bad for our health. Severe weather events and airborne pollutions will increase the incidence of heart disease, asthma, lyme disease and mental health problems.

• Is expensive. Natural disasters cost 18 billion dollars in clean up expenses in 2022.  And where does the money come from to pay for this? From all Americans, via our tax dollars.

• Endangers other species. Climate change will lead to a loss of biodiversity and animal life. No more tigers or elephants, fewer pollinators who are essential to preserving our food supply on land and fewer plankton who live in the ocean and form the base of the food chain on Earth.

Category 4 Hurricane Hilary — and its latter incarnations of a tropical depression and, ultimately, large wet weather pattern careening across North America — could have been much worse than it was. A lot of rain has fallen,but perhaps half of what was feared. There has notbeen much appreciable wind. The existing flood-control infrastructure has been holding. Serious flooding and mudslides have happened across a large area, and we can’t count up all the damage until sometime after this is over. But for now, Hilary stands as an event that is much more significant in what it means than in what it did.

… Continue reading at The Messenger