Editor,

The new national administration casts a shadow on efforts to slow degraded air, water and climate, but in the last couple of weeks, I see evidence that gradual, bipartisan, market-oriented approaches will prevail.

Our Island’s recent Sound Waters conference highlighted CO2-related ocean acidification in its 2017 keynote address. Almost simultaneously, events unfolded across our country that caused me to ask, “Is progress in protecting our water, air and climate really undercut by the new administration?”

First week of the month, past Reagan-era leaders George P. Shultz and James A. Baker III stepped up to head a roster of increasingly active former top-conservative officials calling for a gradually increasing, revenue-neutral national carbon tax. Their true-to-conservative principles Op-Ed appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 7.

A week later, 20 state governors demonstrated their concern over softening environmental and energy-supply protections by writing to our newly elected president.

The governors’ Wind and Solar Energy Coalition, a bipartisan group of governors, advocates for continued efforts to grow an American success story: non-polluting renewable energy.

It is the above-mentioned investment in renewable energy that citizens will increasingly support if the true cost of burning fossil fuel is apparent in our market place.

Pricing carbon pollution reminds us of the cost of pollution in what we burn. We will increasingly buy efficient, non-polluting products, in part by using carbon tax revenue returned directly to citizens. We have a couple of forms that a revenue-neutral tax can take —we decide.

I look to bipartisan efforts and events such as these to show the way in the next four years. Equitably pricing carbon and expanding renewable energy are still very possible.

Today, we have a little more emphasis on the local level than we did last year. Politics are still good at the local level.

The nation will come around.

Lee James

Coupeville