I went to the Public Occurrence on Climate sponsored by RIC, Leadership RI and the Providence Journal on April 15.  The mostly gray haired audience clearly understood that that climate change is being caused by humans burning fossil fuels and that we had better do something very big and right now or this is going to be a huge problem that threatens civilization .  In Rhode Island one of the ways that we can carry our share of the load is to stop building any new fossil fuel infrastructure.  When NO LNG in PVD’s Monica Huertas said that we should stop building any new fossil fuel infrastructure it received the loudest cheers of the night.  And remember how gray haired the audience was.  The people of RI have already decided to oppose any new fossil fuel infrastructure and to demand that the economy be tilted towards clean energy and justice.  It appears that only the political class and those directly paid by the fossil fuel polluters support continue to march off the climate cliff.  We have less than 10 years to turn the tide or the tide will swallow our communities.  NO New Fossil Fuel Infrastructure, let’s not make the hole any deeper. 

Greg Gerritt 

To the Editor, While I would prefer to celebrate the defeat of the poorly thought out plan to monetize the Providence Water Supply, April 4 2019 also brought another editorial in the Providence Journal’s regular series to convince us that building more natural gas infrastructure would be a good thing.  Today’s version is titled “A need for natural gas”.  Everyone who is paying attention realizes that we need to reduce emissions by to zero in the next 15 to 20 years,  and that our infrastructure is more than adequate to handle our gas needs as we dramatically reduce the use of gas and all other fossil fuels in the next 10 to 15 years so as to avert disasters of a scale never before seen by humanity.  If our society builds gas infrastructure designed to last 40 or 50 years,  we either lock in massive warming and the fires, storms, famines, and wars that will accompany a much warmer planet, or we lock in massive debt for useless infrastructure.  
Greg Gerritt