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As wildfire death tolls slowly rise, as homeowners face the loss of homes, as business owners see a life’s work reduced to ashes, as renters no longer have an apartment to return to, the tragedy that accompanies the California wildfires will continue to reverberate for many years just as it does in Lahaina where the same conditions — a lack of rain, tinderbox vegetation, and powerful wind storms — caused brush fires to become raging infernos.

Conditions which permit insurance companies to evaluate risk and provide protection have changed and policies are either vanishing or become prohibitively expensive as the climate changes. Those prevailing conditions were consequences of a climate whose mean temperature had only minor variations for over 1,000 years. Now each year’s mean shatters the previous year’s mean. Our climate is no longer stable, leading to hotter, drier summers interrupted by massive downpours from a heated atmosphere able to hold vast amounts of water. In some places floods; in others drought.

We know the cause of climate instability — burning fossil fuels — but the convenience of using those carbon-polluting fuels to warm our homes, power our transportation systems, and support the manufacture of goods is so great that we are unwilling to give those fuels up despite having alternatives that are safer and ultimately cheaper. The only way to overcome that convenience is to slowly and carefully increase the price of fossil fuels. We can do that without great hardship.

Instituting a tax on carbon, returning that tax to all ratepayers, annually increasing the tax, and requiring imports to pay an equivalent tax on the carbon content of their goods quickly changes national and global behavior. That’s a plan that has received approval from over 3,500 economists including Nobel Laureates, former chairs of the Federal Reserve, former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisors and former secretaries of the Treasury.

Various methods of carbon pricing have been adopted by 40 countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, but because fossil fuels are deeply embedded in the economy, that carbon pricing is politically fraught and easily demonized by fossil fuel companies. That can be overcome with a campaign of public education on the benefits and modest costs associated with a carbon tax and dividend. Returning the tax to all ratepayers reduces the overall cost for over two-thirds of all ratepayers.

Taxpayers in the United States would receive enough or, for low-income households, more than enough to offset the increase in costs. A relatively modest fee of $15 per ton of carbon pollution would increase the price of a gallon of gasoline by a modest 15 cents. That $15 a ton fee would increase by $10 per year until emissions were at net zero. That will impose economy-wide increases in costs, but the dividend would also increase sufficiently to offset those cost increases. Carbon fee and dividend modeling reveals greenhouse gas reductions to net zero in 30 years, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions will also add jobs and improve air and water quality.

Our incoming president and his nominee for Secretary of the Interior have called for increased use of fossil fuels because renewable energy in intermittent but that intermittency can be addressed by small modular nuclear reactors that will be much safer than the continued use of fossil fuels. Continued use of fossil fuels and their carbon pollution is massively shortsighted. No place is safe from climate change driven by carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels. We now have better alternatives.

We must do all we can on a personal level to eliminate our use of fossil fuels, and we must demand legislation that will phase those fuels out. There is no better way to eliminate fossil fuel use than a carbon tax and dividend program. It will require us to give up, for a short time, the easy convenience of fossil fuels, and it will require our legislators to demonstrate courage. The time for both is now.