To the editor:

Have you ever heard someone say: My house is on fire, but please don’t call the fire department? I’ll bet not, because we know it will be more destructive and expensive in the end to let a house burn than to put the fire out as quickly.

So why aren’t we calling the fire department now that the world is on fire? In the past several years, we have seen terrible droughts out in the west, and over many Midwest states, too. And we have seen a terrible outbreak of forest and range fires again this summer. They are not over yet. And though it may not be reported in the news, there have been other countries with the same thing going on, such as in China, where the fires and floods have been even bigger than in the U.S.

We call this fire global warming. It causes droughts; it destroys crops; it causes floods, and it even increases the incidences of infectious diseases like West Nile Virus, and who knows what others are on the way? And because we subsidize it with huge payments to wealthy oil barons, much of the rest of the world hates us and wants to attack us at any opportunity. But let’s not try to roll back our use of polluting fossil fuels to tame the fires.

Let’s disengage ourselves from the Kyoto agreement, but let’s not even try to disengage ourselves from the Middle East so that the wars will die down over there either. Let’s just hide in the closet and pretend our house isn’t burning.

Les Blevins,

Lawrence