Six residents of the greater Waterville area stood in protest of our biggest banks’ ongoing investments in fossil fuels on March 21 on downtown Waterville’s Main Street. Similar protests were happening nationwide, coordinated by a group called Third Act. We are elders, and our generation is unintentionally responsible for the climate crisis that now threatens the lives of our children and grandchildren. We hope that drawing attention to these investments will convince our banks to prioritize saving our children’s world above making money.

We talked about President Biden’s approval of the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska, which would not come online for 10 years. To get their investment back, ConocoPhillips would have to pump oil for at least 20 years. If we are still burning massive amounts of oil by that time, our climate will be out of control.

So it is time to stop financing and building new fossil fuel infrastructure. We will need more energy, but we can build new solar farms and windmills and battery banks much more quickly than we can drill for oil. We need to manage our resources more creatively and with more wisdom, if we want to keep our planet livable. As voters and as bank users, we can start insisting on this.

Richard Thomas

Waterville

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