Letter to the editor: We should do what we can on climate change

I take issue with op-ed writer Dave Murray (“What would I give up for a climate emergency?”) on many counts. He doesn’t want to treat climate change as an emergency, describing a future without so many products made from fossil fuels, while not mentioning the biggest ones, transportation and electricity generation. He sees a binary situation, with no middle ground, such as conservation.

Instead, he proposes preposterous solutions, such as rerouting or mitigating the intensity of tornados and hurricanes. You’re an engineer , so please tell us how to do that. If this were possible, wouldn’t we be doing it already? And the increased intensity of storms is only part of the problem. Have you any solutions when New York City and Miami are underwater?

His essay has many errors. To pick one, he says that until 1492, we thought Earth was flat. False — we knew it was round, and in fact 2,000 years ago the Greek astronomer Eratosthenes correctly calculated its circumference. 1492 was Columbus’ voyage across the Atlantic, which proved nothing about the shape of the earth anyway.

We can conserve in so many areas, like plastic product wrapping, unnecessarily large vehicles, etc. Let’s generate as much of our electricity as possible without fossil fuels. And the mother of all our problems is overpopulation, which nobody seems to want to do anything about. Too many people, driving ever- bigger cars and heating ever-bigger houses. Since we won’t do anything to limit population, we can see nature doing it for us — wars, starvation and disease.

Fred Durig

Delmont