Hoppy column on ACE ruling ignores obvious
While I generally appreciate Hoppy Kercheval’s Friday columns, the Jan. 22 column was disappointing. A federal court recently decided to throw out the deceptively named ACE (Affordable Clean Energy) rule. To say this is a curve ball to West Virginia utilities ignores the obvious.
If Trump’s EPA had kept the original Clean Power Plan, then utilities, rate payers and West Virginia policy makers would have had a predictable regulatory guideline to work within all along, instead of the whipsaw approach about which Mr. Kercheval complains.
The ACE Rule attempted to get rid of commonsense limits on climate pollution from power plants. The Biden administration recognizes the critical need to reduce greenhouse gases now. The world’s ice is melting, ocean levels are rising and warming up and the many intricate systems that compose the earth’s climate are being thrown out of whack as a direct result of pumping too much carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
West Virginia utilities have seen this coming for years and should have been making the transition to renewable sources long ago. Their failure to do so is a disservice to the people of West Virginia and to their own employees.
Betsy Lawson
Morgantown
If you take away jobs, then better have a plan
We need to consider the consequences of change. Forging ahead is myopic. Mistaking a waving and sinuous world for one that is straightforward and linear is like saying “if A, then B” applies to everything, which is oversimplifying and not how the world works.
Biden canceled the Keystone pipeline. He’s going green in a hurry. And 11,000 jobs were lost like a thought in a feeble mind.
COVID-19 has also had unintended consequences. For instance, teachers will soon suffer the same fate as these oil and gas workers when the savings of virtual education are realized.
The only candidate cognizant of residual effects was Andrew Yang. Though he made a convincing case for UBI (universal basic income) as a way to buffer the impact of technology, he was often ignored and even muted in a debate.
If you are going to take away livelihoods, then you better have a plan. If you recognize the link between people and the environment, then you should act like it.
And stop saying Trump changed anything. That was the message behind “Make America Great Again.” He simply undid what was done by previous administrations. He revoked NAFTA, The Paris Climate Agreement and burdensome regulations in order to return to a time when American capitalism gave working people a chance to engineer a comfortable life … before many had found this endeavor suspect and in need of governmental interference, that is. Or, simply put, this was before things had changed.
Change is inevitable. But it elicits nostalgia and a fear of the future. Knowing this and having a practical way to work through it, however, are quite different; knowing something will often stop you from acting, while acting will give you more time to come around to what you know. You need to do both, of course. But we aren’t. Some of us are doing one and not the other.
We need to work together is what I’m saying. And we need to start paying attention to what the other person is doing, especially if they aren’t doing anything.
Shane M. Thompson
Barrackville
