A recent Veronique de Rugy column claims the “New climate report deserves to be debated.”
The report claims fossil fuels are the answer.
OK, let’s debate it. Make it easy.
Forget the weird weather in the rest of the country. Just look out the window here.
Timber is in trouble. Since the year 2000, forest fires are twice as destructive.
Fisheries are in trouble. Climate change isn’t all of it, but it’s a big factor.
Time was, our harbors were full of trollers fishing to feed families. Few remain.
In the 1990s, some 440 purse seiners worked Puget Sound. The latest count is 80.
Agriculture is in trouble. In 2021, heat and drought reduced Washington’s wheat crop from a norm of 150 million bushels to just 87 million.
In 2022 and 2023, cherry farmers needed emergency loans to survive bad cherry harvests.
I invite the reader to spend five minutes on the internet and find out what experts who aren’t on the oil companies’ payroll think of this report.
Those who deny climate change tend to libertarianism, the fatal fantasy that we are not dependent upon each other and upon the good Earth, which we were enjoined to be stewards of, long ago.
We are in this together.
All the wealth-backed nonsense in the world can’t change that.
Douwe Rienstra
Port Townsend