Letter to the Editor:

One does not have to be a greybeard to recall anticipating several weeks, as opposed to several days, of 20 below weather. Local business in our “snowmobile mecca”?certainly won’t dispute the decline in revenues as winters have become consistently milder.

“Big Oil” (corporations in the oil, coal and natural gas industries) has bankrolled scientific research to question the conventional wisdom of man’s role in climate change.

With

the sincerity of someone being waterboarded, scientist on the corporate dole have trivialized the issue with the assertion that there have always been cycles of warming and cooling. These observations are undeniable, but irrelevant. The crisis is not a warming trend, but the impact that the Industrial Revolution has had on typical cycles. What could have taken tens of thousands of years may now have been observed generationally.

I recently read about an oil executive who, while acknowledging climate change, is confident that mankind will adapt. He is willing to bet the farm (it’ll be desert soon anyway) on the possibility that vegetables will be grown in Greenland when currently arable soils are no longer productive.

Since there will always be winners and losers, he concludes, we are supposed to simply “live with it!” Insatiable greed cannot concern itself with devastation in its wake.

Gambling with climate change could wreak havoc upon world economies. Catastrophic storms and protracted drought could lead to world war as all humanity attempts to survive the subsequent cataclysmic challenges.

Is the continued profitability of Big Oil worth that risk? Where is the harm in converting to sustainable Green energy? It would be a lot easier for Big Oil to adapt, diversify, even lead the charge to Green energy than for all mankind to adapt to global warming.

Terrance Moe

Three Lakes