Dear Editor,

Friends, I am worried.

After a nearly snowless winter here, the temperature in Denver last week hit over 90 degrees in mid-March. The normal temp for this time of year is 56 degrees.  Denver was 36 degrees above “normal.”

What will our summer be like when it dries out and heats up in August and September? Could we have giant wind-driven fires?  

President Trump claims climate change is a hoax and that we are all alarmists. This from the man who lives in an air-conditioned bubble.

Sensible renewable energy initiatives passed by congress in the Biden administration counter Trump’s pledge to the CEOs of the large oil companies that if they gave $1 billion to his campaign war chest, he would rescind all the Biden green energy proposals, killing thousands of green energy jobs.

Trump’s comment: We’re all a bunch of radical lunatics. He just issued an executive order rescinding the conclusive scientific evidence that fossil fuel emissions were “endangering the planet,” thus telling his EPA to stop enforcing limits on the burning of fossil fuels.

One must ask, who is the real lunatic?

The idea that energy has to be dug out of the ground, refined and shipped around the world is archaic. A large portion of our energy can now be created anywhere and, to a large extent, more cheaply. Imagine what the blockage of the Straits of Hormuz would be like today if we had followed Jimmy Carter’s initiatives on rooftop solar 50 years ago, or Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” 25 years ago — likely not fighting wars over oil in Venezuela, Iraq and now Iran.

2025 was Earth's warmest year since modern record-keeping began around 1880, and the past 11 consecutive years have been the warmest 11 on record. We can’t go back. What we put up in the atmosphere stays for 90-plus years.     

According to the World Meteorological Organization, 2025 was the first year in which global temperatures averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above those the planet experienced at the start of the industrial age. This was the benchmark that the Paris Accords intended to avoid. U.S. participation in the Paris Accords was supported by Obama and cancelled twice by Trump.  

With every gram of additional CO2 in the atmosphere, we are increasing the likelihood of triggering these tipping points. The longer we wait, the farther we go into dangerous territory. 

And what is keeping fossil fuels alive is the millions that the oil and gas industry spends to sow misinformation and buy political influence and politicians. Yet another reason to get money out of our politics. 

Bill Thibedeau

Gilpin County