Letter: Speak up for the planet
Earth Day on April 22 will bring out all sorts of comments on climate change, loss of wildlife and ecosystems, and chemicals that are actually killing people along with bees, birds, etc., and then most people will forget the environment until next year. Maybe the following will encourage a few of you to contact your legislators to push for faster change.
Vail mountain’s snowmelt was three weeks early.
A recent Scientific American article states that California is on the brink of permanent drought, prompting fears of a new wave of devastating megafires later this year. (How about Colorado?) The article goes on to say that failure to slash the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will make the extraordinary heat, storms, wildfires and ice melt of 2020 routine and could “render a significant portion of the Earth uninhabitable.”
The arctic ice is melting at an astonishing rate, and coastline flooding is already making more and more places uninhabitable.
And if money is the only thing that moves you — an article in High Country News titled “Energy companies have left Colorado with billions of dollars in oil and gas cleanup,” states that cleaning up the nearly 60,000 unplugged wells in our state will cost more than $8 billion and Colorado has collected only 2% of this from the oil and gas industry. But the industry goes blithely on drilling for more.
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We need to transition away from fossil fuels as quickly as we can retrain for jobs in the renewable sector. We need to stop all new wells. I hope that those of you who understand, and can see for yourself what the atmospheric scientists have been telling us, will speak up. Happy Earth Day!
Katherine Delanoy
Eagle
