Most persistent winter of all times or just freaky weather?

To the Editor:
    I am soon to be 86 years old, born in the springtime, April of 1928, at Lewiston, when our Earth had a population of only 1.2 billion.
    Now our “Blue Marble” population numbers over 7.3 billion humans, a 600 percent increase in a single lifetime I am still here to observe. A people explosion. all within my times.

    In the 1930s my father was a Methodist minister who supported Mohandus K. Ghandi, who wanted to give India back to its native people, wrote a check in an amount which Dad couldn’t really afford during our Great Depression when store bread was selling for five cents a loaf. His check was for $10. India had much more population than the USA. When, months later, my Dad’s cancelled checks came from the bank, the Ghandi check was there, cashed, endorsed with Ghandi’s humble personal signature.
    During the 1930s summers my two brothers and I were allowed to sleep out on our screened-in side porch, and on every cloudless night when the moon wasn’t too bright, we could see a sky full of stars of our galaxy, the Milky Way from horizon to horizon. In the meantime, from then until now, we have drilled billions of wells into the earth looking to oil, and if we found it, we pumped it up fast, carbon being the “easy” energy of choice by burning, resulting in a sky filling with carbon dioxide, choking the sky. How many times a year do we see the Milky Way now? Very few. if any.
    I remember at the end of World War II, in 1945 when our car got a fillup at a Muskogee, Oklahoma filling station for the price on the station’s big sign, “8 GAL $1.00” = 12 1/2 cents per gallon! Cheap.
    Back in the 1930s some of our farmers still fertilized their crops with animal manure, but when we replaced the draft horse with a tractor, the tractor gave us no manure, only carbon from its exhaust pipe, So chemistry came to the rescue, discovering how to make fertilizer from oil.
    It takes about a ton of oil or natural gas to make each ton of fertilizer. If we run out of oil, can we use sewage like they do in Africa? Have to?
    Texan President George H.W. Bush’s solution was pump faster. His Son, G.W. Bush’s solution was also to pump faster.
    Could this extremist capitalistic greed lead to the extinction of the human race? Maybe not! Perhaps a century will be enough time to find out?

Charles MacArthur
Sangerville