Law sounds like the Taliban

Abortion

Regarding “Abortion provider sues to stop new Texas law before it's implemented,” ( July 13): This law is what we might expect from the lowest intellects in the Taliban, for instance — where the war on women is never-ending. Instead we have Texas Republicans wanting to pay a bounty to anyone who tattles on a woman who just might need an abortion. What on earth are they thinking? They don’t want to pay for child care, maternal and child health issues, education or medical insurance for the family. But it’s OK to demand that someone else have a baby that she may not be able to care for? It’s time to get off your high horses, gentlemen, and get back to fixing ERCOT, our miserable education system and our lousy health care access.

Mary Needham, Houston

Climate action

Regarding “Carbon fees,” ( July 12): People who say that a carbon fee will do nothing but raise prices are ignoring what happened in the ’70s when OPEC in effect enacted a global carbon fee. Personally, as a plant engineer, I opened a file drawer full of rejected energy conservation projects, put in the new energy prices and had almost all of them approved and in service within a year. A refinery in Mississippi went from buying natural gas to having so much excess fuel gas that they built a power plant to use it. Nationwide the result was a permanent change in the trajectory of U.S. energy use. On the old track, we would be using twice as much energy today.

David Rosenberg, Houston

Fluency and literacy

Regarding “Houston has an ambitious new plan to tackle ‘silent crisis’ of low adult literacy,” ( July 7): I read with great interest your article on “adult low literacy” in Houston. The woman in the article photo, Paola Molina, is described as having been an engineer in her native Venezuela but as lacking “literacy” in her life here in Houston. Molina may not be fluent in English, but she in no way lacks literacy. Houston does have a problem with adult literacy. But fluency and literacy are different issues. This is a story about learning English as a second language. When we read and think about immigrants like Molina and Cindy Estrada, we should respect the skills, persistence and intelligence that they possess. And we should choose diction that reflects accurately what they are trying to accomplish.

Katharine W. Jager, University of Houston-Downtown professor of English