Imagine a government with common sense
The vice president asked us to imagine a future without carbon emissions. The freight trucks delivering food to the grocery stores, school buses driving the children to school and no carbon emissions. I am sure that will happen sometime in the future.
I have a very different imagination about what we need right now.
I imagine people having enough money to buy food for their family, pay their rent, buy enough gas to get to their jobs, close the border, the homeless having a clean safe place to live.
Most of all, I imagine a government with some common sense to do what is best for all Americans.
I imagine a government that will produce enough energy to handle today’s problems.
The government does not have a policy to address rampant inflation.
Maybe, we can buy an electric car with $60,000 in imaginary dollars in our pocket.
Maybe it is just a figment of my imagination.
Ruth Cote
We must stop feeding the bear
Oil and gas finance 50% of the Russian budget. According to Bloomberg, Putin’s war budget will get an additional $65 billion from the last oil price rally. This is more than his military budget for 2020. Putin took Crimea in 2014 with oil at $99 a barrel. Fracking dropped the price of oil to $27, and Trump kept it low. Putin behaved.
Biden started Putin’s war with his war on fossil fuels, skyrocketing the price of oil and gas. To quote an Ukrainian patriot fighter: “Every gallon of gas bought from Russia is purchased with Ukrainian blood.”
Thanks to Biden, we will be a net oil importer this year. Biden wants to rape the strategic oil reserve, buying us weeks of supply. He is letting the solar credits expire.
We must drill everywhere, frack more, build pipelines, reduce regulations, pump oil and gas to create a world independent of Russian oil, at least temporally. Saudi Arabia can assist. The handwriting is on the wall; the world sees Putin for what he is. Do not feed the bear.
Jim Folkner
Russian ‘Ogre’ has come back
If the present is the past coming around again, then W.H. Auden’s poem “August 1968,” written after Russia invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, should be read again aloud:
“The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech. About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from lips.”
Buzz Sienknecht
Sewanee
Don’t buy the ‘it’s free’ promises
People are obsessed with the word “free.” Believe me, there is no such thing as “free.” Someone, somewhere will have to pay for it.
Chattanooga Times “Free” Press, for instance. Newspapers hire reporters, who I doubt work for free. Publishing companies have to have buildings to house their press, etc. They buy paper, ink, computers, desks for reporters, etc. It isn’t free. To get my subscription, I pay a monthly fee. Who said it’s free?
Politicians run on promises – it’s “free!” Free what? Meals at schools, free college, free this, free that. It isn’t free. Someone, somewhere will pay for it.
Stores offer free shipping, bonuses if you buy so much. Trucks cost a lot of money. Everyone knows how much fuel is today. It’s not free.
Many men and women died in wars fighting for freedom. Freedom isn’t free.
Someone is going to pay the price.
Bud Conway
Whitwell, Tenn.