No thanks, Adam Laxalt
Adam Laxalt had four years as Nevada’s Attorney General to investigate and shut down Harry Reid’s corrupt Clark County election machine that kept Republicans out of key offices. Now he wants to be Nevada’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate. Republican voters shouldn’t reward his inaction. No thanks, Mr. Laxalt.
Lynn Muzzy
Minden
Farmer couldn’t be more wrong about climate
In his Aug. 14 commentary, Guy Farmer’s parroting of the fossil fuel industry’s misinformation campaign about our changing climate is an example of the very thing he claims to abhor in current journalism – reporters not being skeptical, questioning, and unbiased.
The fossil fuel industry is using the same playbook that the tobacco industry used for 50 years to deny that smoking caused cancer and hiring several of the same PR firms to do it. I am sure they are pleased with Guy’s piece.
Here we are, experiencing dangerously unhealthy smoke from wildfires that are made more explosive by extremely dry conditions and warmer temperatures. The effects of a warming climate are happening right now in our own backyard, and he chooses to categorize the most recent IPPC report, that is based on the results of over 14,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers and has been approved by all 195 countries in the U.N., as “fear mongering.” Personally, I am going with what I see out my window and actual scientific data rather than the oil industry’s smear campaign as expressed in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page.
I recently became a grandfather, and while Guy and I will be dead before the worst impacts of climate change arrive, I am not willing to look my grandson in the eye and tell him that I knew what was going to happen but did nothing about it.
Chas Macquarie
Carson City
Farmer sharing disinformation
Misinformation: Falsehoods shared by a person that believes them to be true.
Disinformation: Falsehoods shared by a person that knows them to be untrue.
It seems that Guy Farmer's latest column rant on climate change falls into the disinformation category. Farmer is neither ignorant nor unintelligent. Certainly he knows that no climate change predictions suggested that “most of us would not be more or less alive' in 2021 and that climate change impacts are long term.” It is our grandchildren and future generations that will bear the brunt of the effects of our current inactions. And he must also know that Al Gore's “Convenient Truth” documentary on climate change was in 2006, not 25 years ago.
As far as the predictions of the climate models, the current record heat, world-wide record fires, and increasingly extreme floods are worse than predicted by most of those models.
Apparently Farmer has not applied "the skeptical, questioning journalism" that he claims he learned to the pronouncements of British writer Gerard Baker of Fox Business and the Wall Street Journal. Baker's background is in ultra conservative finance, not climate science.
Perhaps if he wished, Farmer could become more educated on the facts of climate change by actually reading the recent U.N. report instead of “fear mongering” about alleged biases of non-Fox, non-WSJ, media that are reporting the current events that we all are experiencing.
Jon Nowlin
Carson City
Look out the window Guy
Every once in a while, Guy Farmer is right. Last Saturday was not one of those times.
Climate change is serious, it's happening now and we're causing it. To call it "fear mongering" is a lousy use of language.
Instead of quoting one former Wall Street Journal editor extensively, how about quoting the 90% of economists and even higher percentage of climate scientists who realize that we must take serious action NOW.
We have not been able to avoid the effects of climate change this summer. Heat waves throughout the country, wildfires "exploding" because of the terribly dry conditions caused by the warming of the planet, flooding that will cause even more losses to agriculture than the overwhelming heat has already caused, not to mention the effects of heat and terrible air quality on all of us, but especially our children.
I wish he were right that the climate predictions are overstated, but the evidence says otherwise. None of us want to believe that our planet is becoming more and more inhospitable to humans (cockroaches will survive just fine), but it is. Most of the wars around the world are fights over resources... just as we will be doing in the West soon... fighting over water.
We've already seen plenty of "climate refugees" coming across our border as California experiences ever more damaging wildfires.
Climate change is a reality that is affecting all of us. Look out your window, Guy.
Midge Breeden
Carson City
Find money for roads in current budget
Last week our mayor invited us to "spin the wheel" to determine what city programs should be cut to find the funds to maintain our roads.
Despite this being a decades long issue, and one Bagwell ran on twice, the best our feckless representative can do is play a game or... raise taxes.
In typical Bagwell fashion, we are presented with two unreasonable extremes (cut a service or don't fix the roads) and her solution... now modeled to appear reasonable. Our city has made little effort to trim spending; continually increasing salaries, programs, and donations to match revenue. Our representatives should be telling us where we can trim money from many of our countless "programs" to obtain the funds we need to maintain our infrastructure.
Yet each year our city funds an increasing demand for "nice to have" issues and cannot find the resolve to pay for critical basic services. Our (well paid) city manager is the former finance officer and Bagwell repeatedly touts her budget experience. Instead of employing cheap rhetoric, how about using some of that expertise? Trim a little from a lot if that's what it takes (rider-less buses, gifts to nonprofits, personnel increases, and operating costs come to mind).
Meanwhile, there is not a single resident of our city unaffected by the increase in property taxes, water/sewer rates, trash collection, and the increase in the general cost of living. We deserve better... much better.
Chris Carver
Carson City
Personal choice?
What does Bill Belcher mean when he states that wearing masks to curtail COVID-19 transmission should be a matter of personal choice?
Does he mean a personal choice to increase the load on health care workers who must care for the unvaccinated when they are ill, and on our society to carry the costs of those disabled by this virus — no small number by the way, and of those who do not pay directly (insured, or uninsured) for the exorbitantly expensive treatments they receive?
Does he mean a personal choice to increase the exposure of as yet unvaccinatable young children confined to school rooms for hours every day? Some of them get very sick, and some die too, it’s not your common cold.
Does he mean a personal choice to deny folk, including possibly himself, timely care for unrelated conditions, as in heart attack or cancer, because the facility serving them is overrun with COVID cases? If his answer is “yes” to any of these questions, I’m not with him on this issue.
Michael Goldeen
Carson City
