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Turn Black Friday green
by getting out to a park
For the past seven years, the East Bay Regional Park District has celebrated Green Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, as a healthy outdoor alternative to Black Friday holiday shopping. Time in nature improves physical and mental health and is a great way to relieve holiday stress.
On Green Friday – a free park day – all park entrance fees and activity fees are waived, including parking, dogs, horses, boat launching and fishing, as well as entrance to Ardenwood Historic Farm. Fee waiver does not include state fees for fishing licenses and watercraft inspections for invasive mussels, or concessions such as the Tilden Merry-Go-Round and Redwood Valley Railway steam train.
Come visit a regional park on the day after Thanksgiving. The hillsides are green and nature beckons.
Dennis Waespi
Park District Board Director, Ward 3
Castro Valley
Desalination must be
tool for water solution
I was happy to read that the “Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022” is proposing that we expand our water supply via reuse of wastewater and desalination plants (“Water proposal resulting in rancor,” Page A1, Nov. 17). As the article says, “you can’t get there anymore with just conservation.”
Further, we’ll spend $1 billion on expanding Los Vaqueros to contain another 115,000 acre-feet which will sit dry most years (“Momentum builds for plan to expand Bay Area reservoir,” Page A1, Nov. 15).
Why not instead spend $1 billion on a water desalination system like San Diego’s Carlsbad Desalination Plant to create 55,000 acre-feet every single year? If done using power plant effluent like at Carlsbad, no additional intake from the ocean is needed; the waste brine gets diluted and cools the power plant discharge.
To weather future droughts, we need to focus on projects that provide new sources of water and move away from denying the certain dwindling of our rain and snow supplies.
Elizabeth Fisher
Pleasant Hill
Carbon tax best solution
to fight climate change
Two solutions to climate change were proposed by writers of letters to the editor on Nov. 17. Trish Clifford’s carbon tax (“Climate summit should have pushed carbon tax,” Page A6) is the better first step.
The intent of Zoe Edington’s call to keep oil in the ground is good (“Biden’s climate fight should start at home“), but executive action often gets stalled in court and can easily be revoked by the next administration. Refusing oil leases merely shifts the source of oil.
Alternatively, a fee on carbon, both domestic and imported, works to reduce demand. The rebate to every US resident would more than offset the fee for those using less fossil fuel. Fees would spur innovation, encourage conservation, and incentivize technologies like carbon capture. Finally, laws passed by Congress are harder to overturn than executive orders.
This route puts us on track for carbon neutrality by 2050.
Dean Shough
Newark
Infrastructure law should
boost high-speed rail
With the signing of the infrastructure bill, there may be as much as $9 billion available to California for transportation improvements including “shovel ready” projects.
If there ever was a shovel-ready project California high-speed rail, in my opinion, is it. Why not apply some of that money to the high-speed rail project with, as Gary Lam suggested in his Nov. 10 letter (“High-speed rail is too far along to stop,” Page A8), competent and experienced contractors who have done this type of project before?
Gerald Veiluva
Oakland
To transition to EVs,
prices must come down
Being old enough to have gone through both gas crises during the 1970s, I have never trusted the oil companies to provide affordable fuel to the American public and bought my first four-cylinder “econo” car in 1980. I have had one ever since and have kept my fuel costs low even at today’s prices.
American drivers are lulled into buying oversized and overpowered gas guzzlers when fuel prices are low and then complain when the price of gas goes high. Now, at roughly $5 per gallon, people will be scrambling to purchase fuel-conserving (less-polluting) cars to run their errands until they fall asleep again when gas prices go down and buy a vehicle that is way too big.
If we are to transition to electric vehicles for many reasons then we need to get the vehicle manufacturers to produce one for the masses in the $20,000-$25,000 range, not models just for the wealthy.
Bruce Krutel
El Granada
GOP rhetoric doesn’t
match federal aid thirst
A recent report by the U.S. Census Bureau reveals the U.S. top 10 states that are “most dependent on federal aid.” Seven of the 10 listed states are Republican-dominated “red” states.
The chart is available online and shows funding as a share of total revenue, by percentage. It is available at the U.S. Census website.
Republicans who constantly accuse Democrats of being “socialists” or “communists” suck up most of our tax dollars from the federal government for their own use. Now it is clear and we know who the real socialists are.
Although they will deny it and blame others, the facts don’t lie. The top 10 socialist states, as reported by Commodity.com, are Alabama, Arizona, New Mexico, Arkansas, West Virginia, Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, Alaska and Montana.
So, at the next election, don’t be fooled by what they say, look at what they do.
Paul Stichick
Rio Vista
Source: www.mercurynews.com