LifeFlight crews talk on the tarmac at the Sanford Seacoast Regional Airport in July. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

A LifeFlight crew was disrupted by a laser last week while flying back to their base in Sanford.

The light was pointed at the helicopter, which was flying at about 2,000 feet in the air around 7:45 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 11, according to LifeFlight of Maine, a nonprofit that provides emergency medical transportation. While the pilot was able to fly back safely, those flashes of light can temporarily blind the crew, who are often wearing night vision goggles, the company said.

The Federal Aviation Administration has monitored thousands of nationwide laser strikes, where someone points the beam at an aircraft. As of Sept. 30, a total of 8,863 incidents were reported to the agency, 24 of which happened in Maine. In 2023, the nationwide total was 13,304.

This is the fourth laser strike reported by a Maine LifeFlight pilot in two years, the company said.

Pointing a laser at aircraft is a federal crime, punishable by a fine, up to five years in prison, or both. And according to Maine law, pointing a laser at a uniformed law enforcement officer or injuring another person with a laser is a Class D crime.

This story will be updated.

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The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com

Jack Shapiro is the climate and clean energy director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine. Jeff Marks is the executive director of ClimateWork Maine.

On Thursday, Maine released its updated Climate Action Plan, “Maine Won’t Wait.” It provides an ambitious and achievable pathway for meeting the state’s climate goals while encouraging new economic opportunities, creating good-paying jobs, saving money on energy costs, and making our communities and businesses more resilient for all Maine people.

A bipartisan climate law passed in 2019 set the stage for the creation of the first Climate Action Plan published in 2020 and required it be updated quadrennially. In those last four years, we’ve seen enormous progress made across the state. But scientists and our own experiences have made clear that the impacts of climate change have become more pronounced, causing damage to critical infrastructure, harm to local communities and businesses, and interruptions to Maine’s way of life.

The new plan provides a framework for addressing these impacts and creates a promising vision for moving forward through a number of strategies, all linked to the health of our economy and the health of our communities.

First is a focus on the two largest sectors for carbon emissions: transportation and buildings. The plan outlines how we can modernize our transportation system to better connect residents to local businesses, critical services like health care, and to provide more mobility choices. Zero-emission cars, trucks and buses are part of the solution, as is expanding public transit and encouraging safer walking and biking.

Making our buildings more efficient, resilient, and healthy is next. Greener buildings will help save families and businesses money while also reducing indoor air pollution and making spaces more comfortable.

Building reliable, home-grown clean energy sources is key. Diversifying our energy sources by adopting proven renewable energy technologies is a practical path forward that will benefit Maine people, our economy, our communities, and our abundant natural resources. 

Most of the technologies we need to help reduce climate change already exist and will cost Mainers less than continuing our dependence on expensive and polluting sources of energy. Investing in new clean energy technologies creates jobs, attracts talent to Maine, and helps local businesses grow.

Maine’s natural and working lands are part of the plan, with a goal to expand conserved land to 30 percent of the state by 2030 while supporting heritage industries like forestry and farming. The plan prioritizes conservation in areas with rich biodiversity, carbon storage potential, lands with cultural and economic importance, and lands that improve public access.

Other key elements of the plan are building an equitable clean energy economy — which already employs 15,000 Mainers — and empowering healthy and resilient communities. We will also want to make sure workers employed in the fossil fuel industries have the training to transition to this new clean energy workforce in order to keep Maine competitive.

For the first time, “Maine Won’t Wait” addresses the impact that waste has on our climate and health. Reducing waste won’t just save taxpayers money, it will encourage businesses to work with entrepreneurs and others to creatively curb plastic pollution, reduce food waste, and lower the burden on our landfills.

Even if climate change wasn’t a crisis bringing increased flooding and storm damage to our doorsteps, these strategies would be common sense. That’s why Maine people from Kittery to Caribou have grabbed on to solutions like heat pumps — that reduce pollution and heating costs all at once — making Maine a national leader in heat pump adoption.

More transportation options and less air pollution, more efficiency and less waste, more job opportunities, and less money spent on out-of-state fossil fuels – these are things we can all agree on.

In face of expected attempts to roll back federal climate action, Maine Won’t Wait presents an exciting opportunity for us to set an example for the rest of the nation. By working together to implement the recommendations in the plan we can improve the lives of all people throughout our rural state, not just a few.

Volunteers Marian Starkey, right, and Sheera LaBelle let people into the building that houses the Planned Parenthood clinic in Portland in September 2022. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

Planned Parenthood of Northern New England says requests for long-acting reversible contraceptives have nearly doubled at its clinics since the Nov. 5 election that resulted in Republicans gaining control of U.S. Congress and the White House.

In the week after the election, Planned Parenthood of Northern New England received 215 appointment requests for long-acting contraceptives, including birth control implants and intrauterine devices, at its clinics in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, almost twice as much as its normal weekly bookings of 111. In Maine, bookings went from an average of 26 weekly appointments to 48 in the week after the election.

While President-elect Donald Trump has said he would not support a national abortion plan, reproductive rights advocates have doubted that he would refuse to sign such a bill.

Advocates have also raised concerns that the Trump administration will restrict access to reproductive health services and could try to use a 19th century law – the Comstock Act – to forbid shipping mifepristone, the abortion pill, across state lines – a claim Trump denied during the campaign.

Abortion rights advocates also warned that a Trump administration could also make it more difficult to access contraceptives.

Almost all Republican politicians are anti-abortion, and starting in January Republicans will control all levers of the federal government, with the presidency, both houses of Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

Nicole Clegg, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, said in a statement that “our patients are worried.”

“They are concerned that they may not be able to access the care they need or make the best choices for their health,” Clegg said. “Election outcomes shouldn’t have this type of impact on people’s lives. People shouldn’t wake up one morning and find that getting the method of birth control they want or need is now out of their hands. These are personal decisions and shouldn’t be subject to political whims.”

The Supreme Court in 2022 reversed Roe v. Wade, leaving decisions about whether abortion is legal up to the states. While Maine passed laws increasing access to abortion, 21 states either banned abortion outright or placed strict restrictions on abortion care.

The first Trump administration, which ran from 2017-2020, instituted a gag order on what abortion clinics could say about abortion care to their patients, resulting in a cut in federal funding to Planned Parenthood.

In addition to the interest in long-acting contraceptives, the number of vasectomy consultations, 26 in the first two weeks of November, had already surpassed Planned Parenthood of Northern New England’s monthly average of 23.

Also, Planned Parenthood has experienced an increase in patients reaching out about the potential for reduced access to gender-affirming care during the Trump administration, although there was no data released about an increase in these concerns.

This story will be updated.

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