Letters to the Editor

OPINION:

Electrical propulsion society

Electrical energy is most efficient for automobile propulsion as indicated in “Petronomics 101” (Commentary, Sunday). Nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, wind and coal are available as energy sources. Electricity is readily available. Electricity is not only clean, but it’s efficient and easy to use.

Ultracapacitors with quick recharge in a few minutes can increase the storage capacity several fold over batteries used in hybrid cars today. This means the driving range for cars can increase to about 150 miles using electricity alone while getting more than 100 miles per gallon equivalent of gasoline and diesel fuels.

Now is the time to transform the country to an electrical propulsion society, and to use the carbon emitted from coal-fired power plants to make carbon fiber to reduce the weight of cars so the miles per gallon can be increased even more.

G. STANLEY DOORE

Silver Spring

Transparency, not diversity, is the problem

I was disheartened to read the opinion piece by Deneen Borelli (“Shaking the foundations,” Sunday, online). Not so much because the piece was extremely conservative; I can deal with different perspectives. Yet, Ms. Borelli in all her “we have arrived” rhetoric failed to accurately tell the impetus behind AB 624. The Greenlining Institute has been delving into the issue of foundation diversity for years prior to the current legislation. In an effort to confirm whether foundations were truly giving to minority-led groups (as negated by rumors that they weren’t), the Greenlining Institute simply asked foundations to confirm or deny such reports. On many instances, only a few foundations even responded to the inquiry. As a result of continued failed attempts to get the “truth,” the Institute then brought their concerns to Congress where a hearing was subsequently held. Again, foundation officials were invited to attend (out of 60, only 4 showed up). It was at this time, that foundations should have spoken up and squashed any further ideas about their limited giving to minority-led organizations. However, they refused to participate and now there’s all this grumbling about how they’re being “shamed.” Foundations should be more ashamed of their lack of transparency and refusal to engage in open dialogue about their grantmaking decisions.

TAMAR CLOYD

Silver Spring

Democrats to turn economy around?

I have been a subscriber to The Washington Times for more than 25 years. This, my first letter to the editor, is to protest the patronizingly haughty and insidious editorials regarding the state of the economy that have appeared since the recent change in editors.

Specifically, in recent weeks there have been editorials presenting economic statistics in great detail, purporting to show how the performance of the economy during the Bush administration was so much poorer than that during the Clinton years. Quite aside from the numbers involved is the question of just what editorial opinion you were attempting to communicate.

You didn’t give any views as to what policies or events accounted for this difference, or what steps could have been or should be taken to improve the situation.

What the reader was left with was The Washington Times telling the public that a Democratic administration was and could be a better manager of the economy than a Republican administration. If that’s the position of the paper, you owe it to your readers to say it out front, not surreptitiously by implication.

Then there is the May 9 editorial, “Definition of a recession.” More of the same. You go to great lengths to take Fox News, Brit Hume, Fred Barnes, et al to task for using what you believe is an erroneous definition of a recession and disparaging them in the process.

What’s your point? Or are you using Fox News as a vehicle to expound your view that the economy is in recession, and that this has great political ramifications (as if no one would know this), and thereby subtly encouraging people to conclude that a new team (Democrats) is needed to turn this thing around?

EDWARD G. KING JR.

McLean

Lack of leadership

Oliver North focuses on Congress’ lack of leadership action on the energy issue (“Petronomics 101,” Commentary, Sunday).

I suggest you could easily take this lack of congressional leadership issue up a level. I would further suggest that, not even counting senior officers, there is more basic leadership ability in action at the platoon level by the enlisted and junior officers who are leading Marines and soldiers and accomplishing their assigned missions on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan than there is in the halls of Congress in a month.

We have all heard various congressmen surface, every now and then, to make the claim that Congress is relevant and a coequal partner with the other two branches of the federal government.

When was the last time the congressional “leadership” actually presented a coherent and comprehensive game plan to the American people? Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party’s “Contract With America” in 1994, I suspect.

This nation is so bankrupt when it comes to congressional “leadership” that it is laughable.Congress makes the mortgage industry look like a well-oiled machine.

While congressional approval rating numbers suggest that we get it, we citizens have still brought our country to the point where we have permitted, for the most part, 535 less-than-average Joes and Joanns (who, in most cases, probably have a fair amount of personal wealth) to become “professional politicians” who are willing to say and do anything in order to stay in Congress.

I’m sure this is one of the very few situations that our Founding Fathers did not see coming because most of them were too busy putting everything they had on the line for this country.

COL. BLAKE J. ROBERTSON (USMC retired)

Stafford, Va.

Climate doomsday predictions

Walter Williams does a decent job of recounting the sorry history of science-based doomsday predictions. (“Into the wild green yonder,” Commentary, Sunday). So why does it seem to be happening again? Is there no scientific basis for man-made global warming?

I remember growing up in Detroit in the 1950’s and ’60’s. The family vacation generally consisted of renting a small trailer for one week, adjacent to the beach, on Point Pelee, Canada. An alternative was several trips to the beach on Belle Isle, in the middle of the mouth of the Detroit River or perhaps venturing to the beach on Lake St Claire, north of where the well-to-do lived in Grosse Pointe, in southeastern Michigan.

If you are shocked that anyone could possibly consider swimming in the Detroit River, or one of the Great Lakes, perhaps you should be. By the late 1950’s, the piles of dead fish rolling up on the beach every morning on Point Pelee started killing the tourist industry.

The dead fish resulted from too much industrial pollution. In fact, there was a story about someone starting a fire by tossing a cigarette butt into the Rouge River, near the Ford foundry. Well, the pollution was reduced, the lakes are back, but no one is going for a dip off Belle Isle.

The problem with man-made global warming is that, the science is in its infancy and the predictions are, shall we say, not something you can hang your hat on.

If you are a scientist in almost any field and you read peer-reviewed scientific journals you know that there is bickering, arguing and discontent about almost everything. In fact, the norm is nothing gets settled until long after you are dead.

There is plenty of basis for man-made global warming. There is also a total lack of certainty in the accounting associated with numerical models used to represent physical processes in the atmosphere and land surface which cannot even accurately predict what will happen next year, much less 100 years from now.

There is plenty of science to back up whatever view you have on global warming, but being correct about the future is a different matter entirely and most scientists know this. Of course I wish I could say the same for journalists and politicians.

SAMUEL BURKEEN

Reston