Unfunny mix: Trump, Russia and uncertainty
Leave it to Donald Trump — reaching out to Russia for help in his quest to become president of the United States. Never mind that his request basically condones foreign state invasion of emails to and from our former secretary of state. Mr. Trump’s banking on some personal benefit accruing to him from a tidbit in one of 30,000-plus messages to or from the secretary — an end that surely justifies his means. (No, it doesn’t!)
This latest maneuver underscores Mr. Trump’s own refusal to release his federal tax returns, as presidential candidates from both parties have done for decades ... without exception for when they were being audited. What else can we expect from a candidate who touts that he will do the unexpected? Of course, nothing stifles business activity like uncertainty — including a chief executive who promises the unexpected!
Desperate to cover up his friend’s gaffe, Newt Gingrich says Mr. Trump was just kidding when he asked Russia to release our secretary of state’s emails. The only joke is Mr. Trump’s candidacy for president. WILLIAM J. BROWN
Squirrel Hill poverty and displacement on millions of poor people living on our seacoasts as oceans rise due to burning carbon fuels.
The author is also correct in saying that natural gas burns twice as clean as coal, but he fails to report that unburned methane leaked and vented into the atmosphere is 20 times more heat-trapping than coal. There is also no mention of the malfunctions of the carbon fuel industry and resulting health impacts well documented by medical science.
Furthermore, to call alternative energies unreliable will just not wash any longer. Solar, for example, can be highly decentralized and is ideal for remote and poor regions of the world. We will continue to need some use of gas and oil, but the perspective of the July 3 article is seriously flawed. DAVID GRAY New Wilmington
In the past few weeks, there have been several pieces in the PG extolling the unalloyed virtues of fracking as the best short-term answer to our energy problem, especially as emissions from fracking are about one-half those of coal.
A little research, however, presents a sharply different perspective. Earlier this year, a major Harvard study determined, through satellite data, that the country’s methane emissions had spiked 30 percent since 2002. Further, since methane’s heating value is roughly 30 times that of carbon dioxide and escapes at an irreducible 3 percent into the atmosphere (because of seepage from millions of pipes, joints and welds), the picture of America’s total greenhouse gas emissions over the last 15 years
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looks starkly different from what has been routinely averred by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The impeccably moderate climate-policy expert Dan Lashof notes that U.S. emissions may actually have gone up over the past decade if you focus on the combined warming effect of methane and CO2. So, rather than being a magic bullet, fracking may better resemble a poison pill in our struggle to combat climate change. I assume the authors of the think-pieces I referred to — as employees of, or spokesmen for, the fracking industry — are serious and well-intentioned, but as the writer Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding.”
And this doesn’t even address the litany of horror stories concerning aquifer pollution. The takeaway: Fossil fuels don’t come in good and bad flavors. They must be left in the ground. All of them. JIM LeJEUNE
McCandless