This may be the first time I have ever agreed with anything official Princeton has to say, but President Eisgruber ’83 is correct. The hysteria over fossil fuels as the cause of global warming (scratch that, now “climate change”) is an ideological issue. Anyone who has made even a 15-minute acquaintance with the field of paleoclimatology would know the world has been through much more dramatic and destructive climatic changes in recorded history long before fossil fuels were in play.

I’m not a fan of the free pass energy companies have been given to ravage the environment, nor of the free pass the military and corporations have been given to poison the world with a wide range of known toxins. These are quantifiable evils and despite our regulators’ attempts to obscure their harm, we know much about what these substances do to human health.

Where’s the outrage about this? Where’s the education around these issues? It’s all been sucked into the well-crafted PR black hole of “climate change,” a boogeyman that by weaponizing the scientifically illiterate has made many white-collar grifters rich.

How precisely — please don’t tell me windmills and solar panels — are we going to replace fossil fuels in order to support the lives of human beings who depend on them right now, not in some glorious but vaguely defined future?

We’re just a few months away from seeing what inadequate energy supplies are going to mean for human life thanks to this hysteria’s triumph in Europe.

Ken McCarthy ’81
Tivoli, N.Y.