The cost of food and fuel this winter will leave many of us unable to heat our homes and feed our families adequately. We welcome the important programs that provide fuel assistance to those who are most in need. We also believe that we must act urgently to prevent those dollars from being wasted forever on expensive fuels running through obsolete systems in leaky buildings. Poor and middle-class families must not be held hostage year after year to old technologies and to narrowly defined economic interests.

The continued waste of energy will lead inexorably to more dangerous debt, more bankruptcies, more foreclosures, and more homelessness. As many as 500,000 Massachusetts households – one in five – are at risk.

Moreover, some of the earlier technologies which created the modern world are now threatening our ability to maintain civilization as we know it. Our national profligacy and inattention has contributed to emerging dangers which, as always, will impose the heaviest burden on those least able to bear it.

As in other moments of our national history, this confluence of threatening events – volatile and rising prices, slow innovation, unchecked self-interest, and environmental degradation – can also offer us the historic opportunity to unite for action. The problems we face – and the solutions those problems require – are interdependent. The right thing to do has become not only possible, but desirable and attainable.

Come to Faneuil Hall on Tuesday, Nov. 25, at 6pm to show your support for urgent action in Massachusetts to meet the needs of our communities and the environment!

Sponsors: Action for Regional Equity, Boston Climate Action Network, Clean Water Action, Community Labor United, Environment Massachusetts, Massachusetts Climate Action Network, and Massachusetts Council of Churches

To learn more, contact Lilah Glick at lglick@cleanwater.org
or call 617-338-8131 ext. 202.