April 6, 2026 Editor, The News-Gazette: After a rugged cold and icy February, spring has rioted around our home in Rockbridge, with crabapple, apple and pear trees abloom. But this plant awakening is a shocking threeplus weeks too early, an expected result of progressing global warming.
I hear some skeptical readers moan. But the increase in the melting of ice in the Arctic, the Antarctic and Greenland is also caused by the same rising temperatures on our planet. And our flowering trees know it.
Why does Donald Trump deny Climate Change? Big Oil is the answer. They funded his campaigns, and as payback he has opened the U.S. and its offshore areas to Big Oil drilling as a payback. He has defunded U.S. climate research and killed wind and solar projects. He has darkened hundreds of existing government websites that once explained the science of Climate Change. He doesn’t want us to know about it, to talk about it, to think about it, or to vote about it.
And our Republican-controlled Congress has consented and enabled his crime. I call it a crime, because if our government doesn’t act soon, we will all suffer, animals, plants, Republicans, Democrats, black, white, young, old, American, Chinese, Iranian; also all of us.
And the flowering trees of spring, and rising sea levels and global ice melting rates, will still be telling you the truth.
FRED FEVRIER Walkers Creek
