Dear Senator Rolfes and Senator Randall,
Thank you for voting for the Clean Fuels bill (HB 1091) and the Climate Commitment bill (SB 5126). The relentlessly rising parts per million CO2 in our atmosphere, with its accumulating consequences for people and other species, mandates that we markedly reduce our fossil fuel use. I’m proud that we in Washington State are taking these critically necessary climate actions.
“The critical issue is not what we know but what we do with what we know.”
— Admiral Hyman Rickover (father of America’s nuclear Navy, quote seen on the wall at the Navy Exchange in Bangor, WA)
Greta Thunberg said that she doesn’t want our hope; she wants our action—for it is in action that hope is created. And as Emily Johnston, co-founder of 350 Seattle, astutely noted (in her essay “Loving a Vanishing Word,” in the book All We Can Save): “What we do this year or next is worth ten of the same thing ten years from now.
You’re doing it, Senator Rolfes and Senator Randall. In the great challenge of our time—climate change/mass extinction—you’re in the thick of the battle, creating, supporting, and navigating the critically needed environmental and climate legislation that’s needed for the coming generation to have a livable future. The actions by you and many of your Senator/Representative colleagues are “what we do this year or next” made real.
Thank you for your foresight, courage, and abilities, and thank you for leading from the front.
Michael Maddox
Poulsbo
Ref: Joseph O’Sullivan and Hal Bernton, “Putting a price on polluting: Washington Senate OKs carbon-cap and clean-fuels bills,” Seattle Times, 9 Apr. 2021, Web, Putting a price on polluting
