Monday letters: Climate science and immigration crime stats
Climate activism isn’t political
A friend of mine introduced me as “the hardest working man in politics” because of my activism in the climate cause. I cringed. I despise politics and consider climate change to be science, not politics. Accept its tenets or stick your head in the sand.
Another friend suggested the climate movement must be political — how else are we going to get the money to mediate the climate crisis? I don’t see that the climate crusade is going to require all that many funds. In fact, money is how we got into this mess to begin with.
We should’ve switched to renewables decades ago. They’re cheaper, safer and don’t need to be extracted. All that was standing in our way was the massive amounts of funds available to the fossil fuel industry — and their knowledge of where to put it. Republicans made climate change a political issue because they’re the champions of big corporations. This is the definition of reactionary.
The Garfield County commissioners reject renewables because the county’s budget depends on property and severance taxes from the fossil fuel industry. During last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump called the major oil and gas chief operating officers to Mar-a-Lago to offer favorable actions eliminating onerous regulations protecting the environment in return for a billion dollars in political funding. We’ve seen how that’s paid off.
Don’t fall into this trap. When you talk climate change, talk science.
Fred Malo Jr., Carbondale
Immigration and criminal records
Steven Fredricks of Grand Junction posted in a letter to the editor on July 28, in part, “So far, out of all those illegal immigrants arrested and detained here, only 2% have a criminal record — or out of 3 million that Trump wants arrested eventually, only 60,000 have any kind of record.”
We’d do well to consider the plight of the 60,000 victims of these incidents. If those 3 million weren’t here to begin with, we wouldn’t have those 60,000 on our records — costing us all, to some degree or another.
Rick Gendreau, Rifle