I love fossil fuels. I love energy. Kyoto. Paris. Rio. And now Glasgow. Promises. Promises. The world will drown in two years if we don’t end…

But meanwhile, Biden begs for more gas, and China digs more and more coal. Obama builds on Martha’s Vineyard. World leaders take hundreds of planes and cars to Glasgow. The world knows it cannot do without fossil fuel, while it pretends otherwise.

I turn on light switches, and electricity/light floods the house. I turn on my car, and gas/oil are at my command, to take me to work, to run cars and tractors and trucks.

Great power lines bring electricity from the Bonneville Dams. The dams provide water and power for the farms that ship barges of food down the Columbia, and transmit power over great transmission lines throughout the region.

I grew up near Pittsburgh, Pa., where coal from West Virginia met iron ore from the Great Lakes, to make iron and steel. Coal from Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia. Great barges crossing the Great Lakes and bringing ore by train (right past my window on the P&LE) to the great steel mills. My childhood was full of the smoke, fire, burning hillsides of slag, and barges on the rivers.

These made healthy America possible: the railroads, the steel skyscrapers, the great factories that helped us win two world wars, all the planes, ships, tanks that overcame the Nazis and Japanese.

Today, the U.S. and Oregon seem to have declared fossil fuels “the enemy” of humanity, to be abolished. “Carbon” taxes seek reduction of carbon use.

This is insanity. We are carbon-based life forms. To the contrary, fossil fuels have made us possible. The energy from water (dams), coal, gas, oil, nuclear (and wind and solar) have transformed the world, and given us light/electricity and millions of products.

We take for granted these miracles of power, which have made our world possible. Idiots from Seattle/Olympia, Portland/Salem, seem to believe that electricity comes from plugs, and food from supermarkets. They have no knowledge/sense of the origins and bases of our civilization. Fossil fuels make us possible. The extraction is no less real if “out of sight” in China or Africa.

In the Northwest, electricity from the great Columbia and Snake river dams and from coal have transformed the region, giving us electricity “to run the great factories and water the land” (Woody Guthrie, “Roll on, Columbia”).

Electricity from the dams and coal plants powered the aluminum plants and the factories which allowed us to win World War II, and gave us the water and power that make the great farms east of the mountains possible. Without the dams and coal, these lands were barren. They make Seattle and Portland possible.

In the wider world, fossil fuels and dams have rescued billions from poverty and famine, from starvation and war, from the horrible destruction of floods, hurricanes, and monsoons. Coal and gas/oil have powered transportation, making possible trade and the distribution of food and goods throughout the world. These are our life blood, to be welcomed, not rejected.

Rather than limit fossil fuels, we should be encouraging more of their use, along with nuclear. Modern utopians have no sense of history, of reality, in which the industrial revolution and its successors were made possible by power, which means water, fossil fuels, nuclear.

I grew up in coal country, Appalachia. We went into the mills or the mines. A “healthy” town was full of smoke and dirt. We came home from work dirty. Sadly, many of our rivers were polluted. But we learned to be cleaner, to reduce water, land and air pollution, to extract more carefully.

This Christmas, I expect to send coals to Newcastle. England faces an energy crisis, and my daughter lives in Oxford. She will need a piece of hard coal for her Christmas stocking. England, like America, is turning its back on fossil fuels, and paying the price. As alarmists cry about climate change, people are actually dying because of lack of fossil fuels.

Alan L. Gallagher

Canby, Ore.