In the Jan. 13 edition of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert writes: “In the past 10 years, more CO2 was emitted than in all of human history up to the election of JFK.”

At the beginning of the Obama administration, I had hope. That hope has been utterly obliterated.

What is the largest contributor to the climate crisis?

In 2014, the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded: “The U.S. military is the largest institutional consumer of oil in the world. Every year, our armed forces consume more than 100 million barrels of oil to power ships, vehicles, aircraft, and ground operations – enough for over 4 million trips around the Earth, assuming 25 mpg.”

Among nations, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United States was the largest consumer of oil in 2018, at 20 million barrels per day (more than 20 percent of the world’s consumption of 99.5 million barrels per day).

The United States (that means me, and you) is leading the way to our own obliteration.

And everyone I ask says, “No action I take will make any difference.”

Meanwhile, we watch our current president pull out of a climate agreement, demolish protections for our environment, fast-track drilling permitting and take us to the brink of more war, to make a partial list of the destruction. He’s putting us on the fast track to our demise as a species.

Mimi Dunn

Portland

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