Letters

By now we all know that our beloved bay scallops are in big trouble, dying off and not recovering. The January 26 article in The Sag Harbor Express, “Warming Waters Blamed for Die-Offs,” confirms the cause: stress on the creatures from warming waters caused by climate change. As Al Daniels notes in his “Outdoors” column in the same issue, “Northeast summer water temps are increasing three times faster than the global average.”

And, of course, it’s not just the scallops that are in big trouble. So are we. What can we do?

Pressure elected officials to take action on climate. They need to enact every law and policy, and support every new technology, that will get New York off fossil fuels as soon as possible. South Fork Wind and the other offshore wind farms that are being built off Long Island and New York City are exactly what we need to produce clean energy, and we need plenty of them. Governor Kathy Hochul must keep those wind developers’ contracts on track.

We also need State Assembly Leader Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins to get out from under the lobbyists and commit to passing the All-Electric Building Act. This would prohibit fossil fuel hook-ups in new construction starting in 2025.

One day we will all need to heat our homes, dry our clothes and cook our food with electricity generated from those wind farms and solar panels, backed up with utility-scale battery storage. We must stop burning things for energy, killing the ecosystems that sustain us.

There was some good news in last week’s issue: Bald eagles and ospreys are thriving again on the East End [“East End Osprey Population Continues To Thrive, Group for the East End Monitoring Program Shows,” 27east.com, January 23]. But there is, as yet, nothing but bad news for the scallops and lobsters, and the people whose livelihoods have depended on them for generations. We all need to get on board with clean energy, ASAP.

Kathleen Boziwick

Sag Harbor