Time is now to address climate change
Any serious presidential candidate must address the climate change crisis. The time for stalling and half-hearted measures is past. If we fail to stop the continued rise in warming due to excessive release of greenhouse gases, the Arctic permafrost will melt, releasing billions of tons of methane into the atmosphere. This will cause a 3-5 degree increase in temperatures, which will then warm the oceans, causing the release of more billions of tons of methane from the seafloor, which will add another 3-5 degrees and, boom, you are trying to survive on the next Venus, the poster child for runaway global warming at a balmy 900 degrees. Denying science has got to be the dumbest possible response to this very obvious existential threat. It’s time to get serious.
The current administration has reversed progress on clean air and water, clean cars, the Clean Power Plan, and has other proposals to gut existing environmental protections at the behest of the crony capitalists in the oil and gas industries. Putting quarterly profits ahead of the long-term survival of America is an insidious form of disloyalty and should result in prosecution. Instead we should take the hundreds of billions in tax breaks and incentives we give oil and gas companies and provide them instead to renewable energy production.
It is high time to address our climate emergency. We have an opportunity to leave a legacy we can be proud of for our children, by engaging in an all-hands-ondeck, moonshot effort to save our planet. The alternative is to go down in history as the greedy, selfish fools who left future generations a hellish, possibly unsurvivable world. Casselberry
Reparations are unjust
Reading one of the guest columns on reparations (“Why reparations are necessary in 21st-century America,” July 3), the column went exactly as I thought it would. For someone to say this country was built on the exploitation of blacks is beyond arrogance, and is obviously driven by a sense of entitlement, greed and smallmindedness. I don’t know why blacks think they were the only slaves in this country, because they weren’t. Blacks have faced racism, as many other ethnic groups have.
I recognize slavery for what it was, which was an abhorrent act of taking freedoms away from men, women and children from all over the world. The fact it took place worldwide a century and a half and earlier does not make it right. To blame all social and economic ills that face black people today on slavery is an absurd argument. The fact that blacks have the highest percentage of single-parent homes is the main hardship facing their community.
The government policies holding back the black community are the entitlement programs put into place that act as modern-day enslavement of the black community. As in reparations, there is no sense of self-responsibility inherent in these actions. There are too many people, black or otherwise, who have worked hard their entire lives to make their families’ lives better, who dispel any arguments for reparations. This is the only country in the world that allows people the freedom to be as successful as they want to be. If you don’t like this country, or its policies, then you have the freedom to leave.
Orlando