Letters to the Editor

Dear Editor,

Important Windham Clothes Closet update!

If you are dropping clothing or items off at the Windham Clothes Closet, please bring them there between 9:00-3:00 Monday through Thursday. Please do not leave them down back behind the building as they will not fare well during inclement weather. If you need to make arrangements to drop items off outside of these times and days call 892-1931.

Thank you for your donations and please let your neighbors know that the clothing there is free, and the hours are Monday and Tuesday from 10 a.m. to noon.

The Windham Clothes Closet

Dear Editor,

Opinion – The U.S. Should not pull out of the Paris Accords

When President Trump announced its intent to pull America out of the Paris Accords of the United Nations Framework for Climate Change (UNFCCC), the U.S. will abdicate a leadership role in confronting the climate change debate. Our country, along with China and India now account for 40% of the worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases from fossil fuel use. 

The Paris Agreement is an attempt to slow the growth of atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions and keep Earth's temperature below a 3.6F increase from pre-Industrial Revolution levels. Otherwise, this science suggests that Earth will reach a “tipping point” at which climate changes are irreversible and no further reductions would slow the onset of climate change. 

Science also tells us that the weather extremes, flooding, prolonged droughts, wildfires, sea level rise will continue throughout the next decades and lead to human suffering through famine, loss of crop habitat, and displaced populations. The drought in Syria (circa 2011) that led to mass migration to Europe was a direct result of a prolonged drought that made agriculture untenable and created a loss of livestock.

While our Sebago Lake region home may be immune to some of these effects of climate change, we ALL, nevertheless, pay a price for these hardships in the form of higher insurance premiums, more expensive food products, snow removal, road maintenance, travel disruption, and disaster relief here and abroad. Our exposure to destructive winter storms and summer heat waves and hurricanes most certainly will continue.  

I urge that you write to President Trump to reconsider his decision to pull out of the Accords in November 2020. The nations of the world are in a war that it started, in the name of progress, and now proliferate with excesses in greenhouse gas emissions. 

On a moral ground, civilizations have a duty to save the planet from the ravages of climate change. Naysayers and those that ignore this problem and think that there will be an ultimate “technology-fix” are sadly misinformed and add nothing to the public discourse: they disfigure Vice President Gore's “inconvenient truth.” in their apathy.

Ray Whittemore