Opinion | America’s Energy Needs and Climate Goals
To the Editor:
Re “Energy Appetite in U.S. Endangers Goals on Climate” (entrance web page, March 18):
The projected new progress in energy demand does current new challenges, however we have now the coverage instruments to deal with them and nonetheless obtain U.S. local weather objectives. New energy sector requirements from the Environmental Safety Company and a long-needed new transmission rule from the Federal Power Regulatory Fee will assist the grid turn out to be extra resilient and dependable.
However, given the challenges, we’d like far more motion. Utilities, regional grid operators and federal power companies have to plan forward and higher assess future energy wants. From there, they have to nimbly deploy insurance policies, applied sciences and market-based methods to take advantage of the grid we now have, present new clear provide, spend money on power effectivity and get smarter about managing demand.
And it’s not simply energy demand difficult the facility sector: Local weather change is posing unprecedented challenges to the reliability and resilience of the grid. What this all means is that we can’t proceed to depend on the soiled fossil fuels of the previous to maintain the lights on.
Local weather will stay on the heart of the challenges going through the grid within the twenty first century, and it should stay on the heart of our options, too.
Package Kennedy
Brooklyn
The author is the facility sector lead on the Pure Sources Protection Council.
To the Editor:
For years, electrical cooperatives have sounded the alarm about threats to electrical reliability. Not all nations have reliable, round the clock entry to electrical energy. If we take our electrical grid without any consideration, we are going to quickly notice its true worth the exhausting means.
Demand is rising and provide is struggling to maintain up. Dangerous public coverage is encouraging the untimely closure of at all times out there energy vegetation, the E.P.A. has proposed new laws that may pressure the shutdown of extra vegetation, and the nation’s environmental legal guidelines make it extraordinarily tough to acquire permits to construct any new electrical era, transmission or distribution infrastructure.
The tendencies will not be getting higher. Over the subsequent 5 years, NERC, the nation’s grid watchdog, predicts that 19 states from Montana to Louisiana are at excessive danger of rolling blackouts throughout regular peak situations. A lot of the nation faces related danger throughout exceedingly scorching or chilly temperatures.
American households and companies anticipate the lights to remain on at an reasonably priced price, and lawmakers should embrace that. The stakes are too excessive to get this incorrect.
Jim Matheson
Arlington, Va.
The author is the C.E.O. of the Nationwide Rural Electrical Cooperative Affiliation.
To the Editor:
The problem of cleansing up the electrical energy provide is to concurrently exchange the fossil-fuel-fired energy vegetation that meet present wants, and provide new demand with non-emitting applied sciences.
Electrical energy consumption will develop for many years due to knowledge facilities, crypto miners and applied sciences that exchange fossil fuels with electrical energy, like electrical autos and warmth pumps. These substitutes can pay larger dividends if that electrical energy doesn’t come from fossil fuels within the first place.
It’s clear that even when we will manufacture or import photo voltaic panels and wind generators, we will’t deploy them quick sufficient. It’s time to start out constructing small modular reactors (S.M.R.s), which create energy utilizing nuclear fission, as Ontario Energy Era is doing and the Tennessee Valley Authority is getting ready to do. We have to get development expertise now, within the 2020s, in order that by the mid-2030s, we will deploy them in massive numbers.
It could take a daring utility to pioneer the way in which, however there may be a necessary new part to the local weather answer. It’s spelled S.M.R.
Kenneth Petersen
Stoughton, Wis.
The author is the president of the American Nuclear Society.
A ‘Staff Bridge’ for Baltimore
To the Editor:
The catastrophe in Baltimore Harbor price the lives of street staff on the Francis Scott Key Bridge and can trigger a serious rerouting of cargo on the East Coast along with the expense of changing the bridge.
Key, who wrote the phrases to our nationwide anthem and sang of “the land of the free and the house of the courageous,” was a slave owner. The alternative bridge shouldn’t be named for him, however it’ll want a reputation.
I counsel the Staff Bridge, in honor of the lads who perished within the disastrous collapse and all these women and men who simply go to work every single day.
Ira Jacobson
New York
Trump and the $60 Bible
To the Editor:
Re “Trump’s Newest Venture? A $60 Bible” (information article, nytimes.com, March 26):
So now former President Donald Trump is hawking copies of the Bible as a result of he’s fearful for the way forward for Christianity in our nation.
That is the ebook that instructions that you just shall not commit adultery; that you need to keep distant from falsehood; that fact shall spring forth from the earth; that you just shall love your neighbor as your self; that each one people had been created in God’s picture.
Actually?
(Rabbi) Gilbert S. Rosenthal
West Palm Seashore, Fla.
Can Simply Anybody Run?
To the Editor:
It may be guessed from all of the information concerning the presidential election that maybe there are now not any requirements or {qualifications} for the presidency. It seems that anybody who presents themselves as a candidate and has sufficient cash to fund a marketing campaign can promise something and run for workplace.
If we anticipate or hope for higher occasions, there must be some commonplace above mediocrity to justify voting for a candidate. In any other case there isn’t any hope for a greater future for us or our youngsters. We now have to demand higher and make that demand heard day by day.
Melvin Dorin
Cambria, Calif.
Flaco’s Merciless Destiny Is Not Meant for Birds
To the Editor:
Re “Flaco, the Beloved Eagle-Owl, Died With High Levels of Rat Poison in His System” (information article, March 26):
After the demise of New York Metropolis’s most celebrated owl, hundreds of individuals have signed petitions calling for a Flaco statue. However the presence of rat poison in Flaco’s system highlights some steps we will take to higher shield all our wildlife.
Lawmakers throughout the nation are contemplating laws that may assist shield birds like Flaco by limiting the usage of lethal rat poisons. In California, existing laws limit the usage of the deadliest anticoagulant rat poisons, which additionally trigger nontargeted wildlife to bleed to demise on the within — a merciless and painful demise.
This yr California lawmakers are contemplating the Poison-Free Wildlife Act, which might place restrictions on all anticoagulant rodenticides. Rhode Island lawmakers are contemplating restrictions on essentially the most poisonous anticoagulant rat poisons.
With safer, equally efficient options akin to sealing buildings and trash, and even fertility management, rat poison restrictions must be enacted in all places. If a poison supposed for rats can poison a star owl, consider all the opposite unnamed wild animals which are unintentionally harmed or killed.
J.P. Rose
Los Angeles
The author is the City Wildlands coverage director and a senior lawyer for the Heart for Organic Variety in Tucson, Ariz., which is a co-sponsor of the Poison-Free Wildlife Act.