Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative proceeds could bring back main streets in energy communities
To the Editor: Pennsylvania’s Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a win for the state’s workers, businesses, families and lands. RGGI would limit harmful carbon pollution from dirty power plants, boost local economies and position the state as a leader in the next generation of energy production. But state legislators who oppose RGGI are siding with the coal and fracking industries instead. They’re using the court system to try and block this successful program. Doing so keeps hundreds of millions of dollars in investments out of our communities. RGGI will require power companies to pay for the pollution they cause, generating billions of dollars over the next several years that could be used to invest in Pennsylvania’s clean-energy future. Many of our once-bustling main streets are desolated, but RGGI will provide a boost for Pennsylvania’s business owners and entrepreneurs. A lot of the money generated by the initiative could come directly into communities like ours — those most impacted by absentee corporations that care more about their bottom lines than the communities they operate in. It just takes the right legislation to make it happen. Josh Shapiro has been clear about his priorities for clean energy. During his campaign, he said we must “take real action to address climate change, protect and create energy jobs and ensure Pennsylvania has reliable, affordable and clean power for the long term.” Pennsylvania’s continued participation in the successful RGGI program will ensure the energy jobs of the future are available in all our communities. And that’s an opportunity Pennsylvania can’t afford to pass up. Nina Victoria
Community Advocate
Center For Coalfield
Justice
Staying awake
To the Editor: In his crusade against “wokeness,” Mr. DeSantis (Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis) invites the nation to go back to sleep. Not a good idea. For 250 years, the nation slept through the horrors of slavery. Then we woke up and fought a Civil War to end that practice and finally extended basic rights to the formerly enslaved. We were then lulled back to sleep and those rights were taken back under Jim Crow while – not incidentally – the government intervened violently to suppress working class attempts to improve its conditions, as in the Homestead Strike. It was a fitful sleep and some reforms were granted (mine safety, food and drug regulation) but the sleep continued until it finally ended in the catastrophe of the stock market crash of 1929. This woke us up again and the nation’s greatest period of reform followed under FDR. We stayed awake long enough to fight another war and stopped the march of political monsters. But we were lulled back to the Nembutal sleep of the Eisenhower era, during which a witch hunt took place under government direction to make sure we didn’t wake up again. Finally the kids (my generation evolted against racism at home and imperialism in Vietnam). In 1980, Reagan arrived to restore national order and restfulness. But it was a restless sleep, culminating in two disastrous wars, the destruction of the great city of New Orleans and a crash that threatened the very existence of capitalism. Mr. Obama arrived to fix things but with limited success. In a desperate and impossible attempt to go back to some unspecified era of national peace, Mr. Trump then offered the nation a dreamland that never existed. His false promises only deepened divisions in the country and completed the wrecking of the Republican party which has not the least clue about what to do. Meanwhile the weak liberalism of the Democratic party allows it to press for only marginal reforms and is unable to formulate a visio of the nation’s future which people can believe in. A Harvard graduate, Mr. DeSantis apparently slept though his history courses there. There is no need for the rest of us to repeat that error.
Robert Supansic
McKeesport