Stop supporting the fossil fuel industry

The Dec. 21 Press Herald article about the flood was moving, with descriptions of the river wrapping around someone’s house and consuming his car. One person said, “Everything I have is floating away.”

While people need to be aware of this tragedy, it’s presented like a rare event. The reporter tells us that Greg Stewart, from the U.S. Geologic Survey, says this will very likely be the state’s second-largest flood on record. Good information, but the crucial point is that this flood is really the beginning of an era of such disasters because of climate change, not a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Yes, the Veterans Memorial Park in Lewiston should be rebuilt, but instead of concentrating on that, we need to be discussing how to get Maine and the world off of fossil fuels so these floods do not get worse. The extreme weather that caused this flood resulted from rising greenhouse gases and 75% of greenhouse gases result from burning fossil fuels.

Currently, our government and other governments are massively subsiding the fossil fuel industry. In the distant past, subsidization of fossil fuels made sense but no longer. In the book “Fire Weather,” author John Vaillant explains American taxpayers each pay about $2,000 a year to subsidize fossil fuels. This is wrong. Individually we need to change to renewables, if possible, and more importantly, everyone should tell their legislators to stop supporting the fossil fuel industry and move quickly to renewables.

Nancy Hasenfus
Brunswick