As the frog noted, “This water is getting warm!”

Some locations are drying up, others are flooding, others are on fire or besieged by storms on steroids. It is unacceptable that the GOP’s hyperpartisan stampede to erase the language and (it hopes) the memory of wokeness in our country has allowed climate science and whole agencies to be erased.

There is a saying in business: If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Behold the irony in the way DOGE “improves” efficiency by brandishing chainsaws and feeding our national intelligence into shredders, rather than by transparently engaging institutional intelligence to devise a determined and sensible belt-tightening strategy.

It is difficult to regard DOGE and its wall of phony receipts as an operation run on a par with organizations that produce state-of-the-art cars, spaceships and satellites. No, DOGE is swapping conscientious, nonpartisan civil servants with inexperienced loyalists and AI.

Gut EPA pollution regulations. Kill DOE clean energy programs. Halt measurement of weather events by hacking off chunks of NOAA. Hide the evidence the planet is heating. Problem solved. Look everybody, we fixed the climate crisis (President Trump takes out magic marker). See, temperatures are going down!

Except they’re not. And we will be sitting ducks, like the Ukrainians, after Trump turned off their intelligence flow.

There is still a chance to fight for our Constitution, our rights, our democracy and our climate. It’s time we jump out of this rapidly warming pot and into action.

Julia Bassett Schwerin
Cape Elizabeth