On the coldest night of the year, every winter, my family likes to watch “The Day After Tomorrow.” The special effects are stunning, the acting is surprisingly good (Dennis Quaid is nothing if not dependable) and the science is fiction.
When the movie was released in 2004, the idea of observable weather events that could be connected to global climate change hadn’t quite penetrated the public consciousness. Climate change was supposed to be something far in the future that would happen gradually – something to worry about, but with plenty of road to kick the can down. It wouldn’t happen as soon as, well, the day after tomorrow.
It’s tomorrow. The day has arrived. I was scrolling through the newspaper while drafting this column, trying to find a recent unusual weather event to illustrate the ways climate change is currently affecting us (you always want to use concrete examples to illustrate your points, as my various writing teachers taught me), and there are too many to fit my word count. As of press time, wildfires in Hawaii have killed 80 people. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), part of a system that moves water of varying temperatures throughout our oceans, is running amok (reportedly close to collapsing and dramatically altering weather on both sides of the Atlantic).
I wrote about some of the reasons I support Pine Tree Power last week, but I didn’t mention the climate change argument. I figured climate change was important enough to deserve its own column.
Climate change is an existential threat to humanity; even if it doesn’t wipe us all out, it’s certainly going to cause an immeasurable amount of human suffering. Floods. Droughts. Wildfires. Ripple effects we can’t even imagine yet.
I’m not a doomer. The worst does not need to pass. But I’ve been working in the medical field long enough to know that in order to stabilize the patient, the first thing to do is stop the bleeding. In this case, we – state, country, world – need to stop burning fossil fuels and throwing carbon dioxide into our overheated atmosphere. We can absolutely do this; we have the technology. Wind and solar, in particular, have made leaps and bounds in affordability and ease of use in the past 20 years (to say nothing of nuclear energy, which has been around for a while, for better and for worse).
And in the long term, green energy will be far, far cheaper than fossil fuels. It’s renewable. It’s locally sourced. The sun shines everywhere. And it would be good for our national security and general sense of independence (we wouldn’t have to suck up to Saudi Arabia anymore).
Meanwhile, there’s a hundred years of economic infrastructure built up around fossil fuel companies, in particular, oil companies. Those companies are not going to put themselves out of business easily.
Transitioning our economy to 100% renewable energy is humanly possible, but it’s going to take a big upfront investment. Think the upfront cost of buying and installing a heat pump and the way in which a heat pump is more expensive than a few tanks of oil, but in the long run it will be cheaper. We’re going to have to do that on a societywide level, and I just don’t think that a company with a mandate to generate regular profit for investors is going to be much of a a leader in transitioning Maine to renewable energy. That’s one of the reasons I will be voting for the creation of Pine Tree Power. Entropy is a powerful force. So is greed. The rich will not make sacrifices to help save the rest of us unless we make them.
Everyone needs to do their part to address the problems of climate change, and this includes Maine. Our state motto, Dirigo, means “I lead.” We could and should lead America in clean energy. (Have you been by the coast on a windy day recently? It’s powerful!) In 2021, 72% of Maine’s in-state net electricity generation came from renewable resources, although a significant chunk of that is from biomass, which is renewable but not quite “green.” That said, we currently consume three times as much electricity as we generate, and we fill that gap primarily with power from out-of-state, non-renewable sources. So we do need to make some changes.
I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. But I’m willing to make a few sacrifices. I’m already sacrificing money to Central Maine Power – last month, $182! If I’ve got to continue paying that much, I’d prefer not to at least be destroying my future children’s planet while I’m doing it.
Victoria Hugo-Vidal is a Maine millennial. She can be contacted at:
themainemillennial@gmail.com
Twitter: @mainemillennial
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