Letters to the Editor

Divest funds from fossil fuel supporters

The old joke, “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” is dated.

It’s now an indictment. We all talk about the extreme heat, flash floods, frequent hurricanes, etc. caused by climate change, but nobody — or very few of us — does anything. We think there’s nothing we can do.

In her TED Talk, “What One Person Can Do About Climate Change,” Ella Lage offers us a simple yet effective way of taking action: Ask an institution you support with your money — bank, pension fund, school, insurance company, church—to divest their capital from companies that extract fossil fuels and put it into renewable energy. Why not try it?

You can tell them those investments are not only a root cause of climate change but, for that very reason, increasingly at risk of becoming stranded assets — the “carbon bubble” effect. If you’d rather do it as part of a group, look for a local divestment campaign. To see how much of your savings are in fossil fuels, do a search on fossilfreefunds.org.

Divestment advocacy, with its power to influence public opinion, has worked in the past. It will work now. In the 1980s, the campaign to divest from companies supporting South Africa’s apartheid regime helped bring down apartheid. Today, a rapidly growing fossil fuel divestment movement has already led more than 1,500 institutions worldwide to commit to divesting roughly $40 trillion.

Let’s stop talking about the weather and start doing something about it.

William C. Engels

– Pullman

‘Revisionist’ history more complete

If the only way you learn history is from the promoted myths of statues, place names or street names, then you have only yourself to blame for your misguided sense of injury.

The revisionist history that offends you offers a more complete picture of the history of broken treaties, difficult native-settler relations and broader inclusion of points of view of historical events. History is far more nuanced and interesting than cardboard heroes and white manifest destiny.

It is time to pay more attention to who we honor, instead of knee-jerk offense to change.

J. Mamanakis

– Cheney