Richard Thomas is a recently retired psychologist in Waterville and a longtime climate activist.

America’s gradual loss of democracy worries me, as our executive branch is seizing the powers of our legislature and courts and using that power to oppress minorities. Millions of people will be harmed or killed by President Trump’s policies.

This is a tragedy we should resist mightily, but his dictatorship will not last forever. Countries have been turned into dictatorships and have eventually freed themselves in the past. And if we show enough courage, we could remake an American democracy, better than before.

I am even more worried by Trump’s attack on the renewable energy industry and his giveaways to the fossil fuel industry. Last year, the fossil fuel industry gave $219 million to help elect Trump and the Republican congressional majority, according to Yale Climate Connections.

Now this industry is getting its payoff. The president is trying to stop the transition to renewable energy at a time when climate change is becoming more dangerous. And we are passing environmental tipping points now, which will cause our climate to worsen even after we switch completely to renewable energy.

If we recover from this environmental assault, it will take thousands of years, and it is likely that more than a quarter of all species of life on Earth will become extinct.

We’re all participating in a race that will determine the fate of our children. On one side is climate change, and the world’s best scientists tell us that this is accelerating faster than anyone expected. On the other side is renewable energy, and this is also growing faster than anyone expected, because renewable energy is much cheaper than fossil fuels.

There will be no decisive winner of this race, as both racers will continue running. One day, the building up of renewable energy may be completed, but our climate will then be far more dangerous than it is today.

Much of the world will become uninhabitable, our Gulf Coast will be too hot, too many wildfires in the Rockies, flooding of our coastlines and too severe storms in certain areas. Many American climate refugees will emigrate to Maine, and how will this affect our already extreme housing shortage?

What is not yet clear is how many people will be able to adjust to the new climate, or whether the Earth will be too damaged for us all. We should be improving our families’ chances of surviving and having good lives by accelerating our efforts to stop climate change, not by halting these efforts.

The steps we take today to reduce climate change will have much more impact than the steps we could take years from now. All of this is to say that the president is endangering and harming our families’ lives when he does the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, protecting them from their competition, renewable energy.

As time goes by, it will become clearer and clearer that we are quietly watching a terrible crime against humanity and all life on Earth.

We must ask Sens. King and Collins and our House representatives to push harder to protect the climate legislation that was starting to safeguard our children. How did we learn to sit on our hands while someone harms our children’s lives just to make more money?

The government’s first obligation is to keep us safe. Watch the weather and remember this issue when you vote next year.