Rolf Westgard’s Thursday letter to the editor asserts that replacing nonrenewable energy sources with renewable ones creates “an expensive double infrastructure” and ends by suggesting that we should pause our investments and see “what is really happening with our climate.”

Westgard’s letter blithely glosses over the fact that fossil fuels are not renewable. As in, they don’t come back. Our energy infrastructure is built around resources that will either run out or become prohibitively expensive, possibly within our lifetime. Imagine the effects of paying $20 for a gallon of gas or thousands of dollars for an electric bill.

Rather than waiting until we are forced to change by prohibitive expenses or dramatic shortages, we should begin adopting sustainable energy sources and begin the process of changing our infrastructure. Westgard claims we should delay investing or developing these energy sources because they are far too expensive. It’s easy to accuse renewables of being too expensive or unproductive when they have had far less time to develop and a pathetic amount of financial investment in comparison to fossil fuels. Additionally, skeptics ignore many of the hidden costs of fossil fuels and the expense of global warming, wars, regulation and subsidies we pay to either the fossil fuel industry or to the
government.

We must adopt and research renewable forms of energy and continue to increase energy efficiency if we are to leave future generations with an energy infrastructure that will actually support them. There is no time like the present to begin our investment in renewable energy and to step up to our responsibility.