Letters to the Editor, Week of Nov. 16, 2022

Editor,

The community owes a huge thanks to the Mount Baker Theatre, Village Books and Cascadia Daily News for collaborating to bring Bob Woodward to town (CDN, Nov. 13, 2022) for the informative and hope-inspiring show on Saturday night. 

Not only was it a fitting and hopeful end to a week of election anxiety, but it was also a stirring, thought-provoking and important reminder of what a key role sensible and sane journalists play in helping separate the crazy from the truth in a time when an astonishing segment of the voters and public seem willing to believe all manner of nonsense and lies.

Sensible Republicans, a fast-disappearing breed, should be lauded for maintaining what may seem to some to be a loose grip on reality, but those spreading the nonsense need ostracization at a minimum along with some serious mental health evaluation. Difference of opinion does not come close to explaining away the crazy, Trump-inspired conspiracy theories and total idiocy some are so willing to embrace. 

An extremely poignant moment in Woodward’s appearance was his insight into what Jerry Ford told him as to why he pardoned Richard Nixon, and why Ford received a Profile in Courage award for putting the country’s interests ahead of the desire to prosecute Nixon.

This voter believes that we presently have a far more serious and toxic situation today that clearly needs some herculean efforts made to get beyond allowing the conspiracy-addled and seriously undereducated to continue their rampant attention-grabbing nonsense to poison our politics. 

Trump and company’s actions are so blatantly anti-law, order and justice-based, prosecution and relegation to the deep dustbin of history is the only sensible action if we are to retain any credibility and integrity going forward.

This crazy one-third of voters among us may rant, rave and distort for the foreseeable future, but that makes it incumbent on all of us as parents, adults, educators, journalists, citizens and politicians to take responsibility through our personal actions to teach our children well and restore sanity to a country spinning off the rails.

Michael Waite

Whatcom County

Editor,

Now that the 42nd District has entered a new era, is it too schadenfreude to ask what the heck Doug Ericksen was doing in Nicaragua during the pandemic before we go and name a bridge after him?

P.S. Well done, Rud Brown.

Lynne Findley 

Bellingham 

Editor,

Cascadia Daily News interviewed the mayor [Seth Fleetwood] who pitched his Climate Action Plan (CAP). The 2019 summary of the CAP shows the intent is to provide the city with a package that could put the city government and community on 100% renewable energy by 2030–35.

The measures are the standard stuff: reducing heat leakage in structures; replacing gas furnaces with heat pumps; electrifying the transportation system; etc.

All of these, as pointed out in the summary, will be expensive. For the private sector, upgrading existing structures to comply with the CAP could require major subsidies. Hence the mayor’s proposed Climate Change levy.

Independent of the CAP, we all know the public utilities are subsidizing some upgrades, and existing building codes are reflecting some of the measures anyway.

The intent of the CAP is good, it seeks to reduce fossil usage. And the city, with its usual projection of aggravating civic narcissism, continues to be affirmed. 

But how comfortable should we be transferring the large incremental city power load from Bellingham to the hundreds of existing wildlife- and sight line-killing wind farms; or square miles of habitat-destroying solar arrays?

At this point, we have nearby communities that are not likely to embrace the Mayor’s CAP, and three local refineries that are showing no signs of shutting down.

Compared to the city’s emissions, refineries arguably produce more CO2 in a few weeks than the city produces in a year. Promoting the CAP as “leadership” in climate change is debatable, as the net effect just moves Bellingham’s energy burden elsewhere, to technologies that have their own climate and environmental warts.

The Mayor is draining the CO2 swimming pool with a teaspoon, while at the same time a neighbor is filling it with a fire hose.

The issue here isn’t that we shouldn’t be climate-focused; we should. It’s having a city leadership forcing virtue-signal regulations that bring very small positive net gains at very high environmental and monetary costs.

Bob Morton

Bellingham 

Editor,

In his column entitled “We Northerners are right about the clocks — more than twice a day,” (CDN, Nov. 9, 2022) Ron Judd omitted a proposal to create a single time zone for the world. That is, all clocks will read Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or Zulu Time (Military). Dispense with a.m./p.m. and use the 24-hour designations as many countries and militaries do now. One a.m. would read 0100 hours and 6 p.m. would become 1800 hours.

Time designations are arbitrary anyhow, so what difference does it make if you eat breakfast at 0100 hours or 1800 hours? And that Zoom meeting at 1500 hours would be easy to determine no matter where in the world one lives. No more adding or subtracting hours for differing time zones. Yes, you might wake up on Monday and go to bed on Tuesday, but so what?

Once the clock passes 2400 hours, you use another date. Those who want to read more on the topic, just search on the Internet for “one timezone worldwide.” After that, we can all have happy hour downtown at 0100 hours to discuss the time.

Dick Conoboy

Bellingham 

Editor’s note: He’s not wrong.

Editor,

I find that American partisan politics are not unlike those of Canada. For example, one party having control over Canada’s House of Commons doesn’t translate into individual elected members actually representing their specific electorate. They basically represent their party and its ideology, thus policy.

Even then, our elected leaders and governments are increasingly becoming symbolically “in charge,” beneath the most power-entrenched and saturated national/corporate interests and institutions.

Most notably, powerful business interests can debilitate high-level elected officials through implicit or explicit threats to transfer or eliminate jobs and capital investment, thus economic stability, if corporate “requests” are not accommodated.

Lobbyists will even write bills for our governing representatives to vote for and implement, supposedly to save the elected officials their own time.

It’s a political crippling that’s worsened by a blaring news media that’s permitted to be naturally critical of incumbent governments, especially in regard to job and capital transfers and economic weakening.

Apparently, politically potent and focused big business interests get catered to, regardless of which of our two largest parties governs.

To quote “Calamity” Jane Bodine in the film “Our Brand Is Crisis,”: “If voting changed anything, they’d have made it illegal.”

Frank Sterle Jr.

White Rock, B.C.

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