Climate Change
Dear Editor: I’ve listened to two debates, with our presidential candidates and their VPs and head the slimmest of mentions of climate change. It just reminds me of the need to literally pull our heads out of the sand and face what is before us.
Syria was in an unprecedented drought from 2006-2010, 1 to 1.5 millions rural residents moved to urban areas, along with a similar number of Iraqi war refugees. U.N. pleas for aid went unheeded, social order collapsed. The seeds of our Syrian nightmare.
The Department of Defense concluded that climate change is a significant threat multiplier, but Congress passed a rider to the defense budget forbidding use of funds to study the issue.
We are on track for 2016 to average over 400 ppm. Co2 in the atmosphere for the first time since humans have existed on earth. Studies indicate that 350 ppm is the tipping point of societal collapse. Rising sea levels, thousand year weather events every few years. Drought, famine, floods, refugees. Staggering financial and social costs.
Lisa Murkowski, who heads the energy committee in the Senate not only gives token acknowledgement of the climate crisis, her web page reads like a big oil ad. Dan Sullivan says the jury’s still out on human causation. Don Young says it’s all a big hoax.
We struggle for our children’s future against an entrenched oligopoly where six corporations control 90 percent of news outlets. Our pay-to-play political system seems designed to ensure that nothing ever changes in our race to disaster.
Human-caused climate change is fact. This is not a two-sided question any more than flat vs. round earth. Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists have reached consensus on indisputable fact. Magical thinking and the millions spent to obfuscate the issue by those who profit from carbon pollution notwithstanding. Reality is we are in an unprecedented dangerous precipice and must agree and act accordingly for humanity to have a future.
And what can we do?
Spencer Severson, Sitka
Blue Lake Dam
Dear Editor: The city asked voters to approve a $50 million Blue Lake dam expansion. They told us 80 percent of our homes and hot water was being heated with oil and we could save money and reduce our carbon footprint by converting homes, businesses and public buildings to electrical power.
Based on this information the city asked the state to help pay for the project and increased our electric rates hoping the project would then be paid for when it was done. When the cost of the project increased to 75 million, 100 million, and then 158 million dollars the city pushed ahead without asking voters to approve the higher price tags.
After the state has contributed 50 million dollars we are faced with an electric fund $130 million in debt, millions more needed because the new turbines are damaged, Green Lake dam has major problems, substation replacements, and a city government that wants to sky rocket our electrical rates and taxes to pay off this disaster.
The Blue Lake dam project they promised would lower the cost of living in Sitka is now a monster driving people out of town, damaging struggling low income families and young people wanting to stay here. We were told the whole idea behind the Blue Lake dam project was to entice residential customers to switch from oil heat to electric heat with lower rates but it looks as if the idea will end up requiring residential customers to subsidize the federal government, state government, the university, schools, hospitals, seafood processors, etc. as residential rates climb and the big users get cheap power through interruptible rates.
Clyde Bright, Sitka
