Coal-fired power far from cheap
To the editor:
Your Wednesday editorial, "More power plays," supported the building of new coal plants in Nevada, arguing that creating more power is the only way to stabilize utility rates. That claim falls short on two accounts.
First, only half of the energy to be produced will be sold here in Nevada. White Pine Energy Associates and Sithe Global Power are proposing to construct merchant coal-fired electricity generating units in Nevada for which they currently do not have customers, but are likely to provide electricity to customers outside Nevada. This is a consequence of Nevada's lack of emissions regulations, which enticed these out-of-state power companies to construct polluting facilities inside the state's borders for the purpose of out-of-state consumption. Thus, Nevada's ratepayers will not benefit from these out-of-state sales, but will have their state become a free dumping zone for carbon emissions.
However, it will not be free for long. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Congress, in an unusually bipartisan fashion, is set to propose either a carbon cap and trade system or a tax on carbon emissions. Either way, the creation of higher carbon emissions by the new coal plants will, in conservative estimates, add a more than $500 million a year financial burden to the utilities, which they surely will pass on to their unwitting ratepayers.
Due to this future cost of carbon, building new coal plants will certainly not help stabilize utility rates. Sadly, it will do just the opposite.
Stuart Erdheim
LAS VEGAS
Entitlement red ink
To the editor:
Your Friday editorial, "Road to ruin: Entitlements will bankrupt the country -- do the candidates care?" is accurate, yet fails to focus upon the current administration. While nearly every prior administration for the past two decades has dodged the entitlement-fix bullet, the current Bush administration had the best opportunity to implement a fix for Social Security and Medicare.
The simple and easy fix was, and still is, Social Security. These fixes have been fully documented by bona fide study groups during the past six years. So here we have an administration that for six years was in total control of the federal government but was unable to solve even the simpler Social Security funding problem. Medicare is seven times the financial problem that Social Security is, and solutions here may well lead the American public to insist upon a universal health care system, not just an over-age-65 fix.
The fault for not properly addressing these entitlement program funding problems does not lie solely with the administration and the Congress, but the buck does stop with the president. George W. Bush was to be the "uniter not the divider," unfortunately, he failed miserably at this. Like his father, his lack of the "vision thing" has gotten us into an expensive and protracted war of poor choice while setting our entitlement programs adrift in a tsunami of red ink.
Richard Rychtarik
LAS VEGAS
Traitors among us
To the editor:
Among those who would destroy America, many are our own citizens.
They hide behind a veil of patriotism while simultaneously undermining the efforts of America to fight the war against terrorism. They send our sons and daughters to fight an enemy dedicated to our destruction, while simultaneously proclaiming that the war is already lost.
Many travel to the Mideast to grovel at the feet of dictators who fund, train, arm, and direct their mindless degenerates to kill our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to murder innocents all across the globe. Here, they publicly engage in the false character assassination of our men and women in uniform -- from officers to the enlisted -- and solely to gain political advantage.
The world's terrorist hierarchy, from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Syria's Bashar Assad, are unanimous in the praise and appreciation they heap upon the actions and words of these individuals and their treachery. Even the aging murderer Fidel Castro cannot let their enormous benefit to terror and world tyranny go without favorable notice.
And lastly, they want your vote. What's frightening is that they sometimes get it.
K.D. Adams
LAS VEGAS
Dingy Harry
To the editor:
Quick question for those who elected our country's Senate majority leader: Is there anything that Harry Reid is actually for?
I've never before seen someone with such an incredible amount of oppositional reflex. It appears that the man is simply knee-jerk opposed to anything and everything. If you are in a leadership role to effect change, don't you have to have some vision as to what you are for, and not just a bitter and grumpy display of how much you hate everything about your country?
Jeff Shore
AUBURN, CALIF.
