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Gasoline discount isn’t
panacea but it surely helps
After studying “Our forests have been screaming at us. Are we able to hear?” (Web page A6, March 1) I used to be as soon as once more struck by the attractiveness of gas discount as a response to elevated wildfire danger. Why?
Gasoline discount looks like a believable method to stop future fires. The general public usually equates wildfire and forest fireplace although lots of immediately’s worst fires happen removed from forests.
Gasoline discount offers officers an answer they'll provide a terrified public.
Even higher, the answer doesn’t ask the general public to do something, and it permits timber business donors to log extra with no oversight for the reason that acknowledged aim is thinning not logging.
Sadly, gas discount doesn’t cut back wildfires. For that, we would want to do extra to handle local weather change.
What we are able to do is construct our homes with nonflammable supplies in areas that don’t normally burn and preserve 100 ft of defensible house.
Karen Maki
Menlo Park
Give little leaguers
a protected place to play
Inexperienced Foothills helps Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez’s suggestion for the county to maintain Eastridge Little League for 5 years (“Baseball strikes out at Reid-Hillview,” Web page B1, Feb. 25). The League deserves clear, protected enjoying fields, away from the lead-contaminated setting of Reid-Hillview Airport.
For over a yr, Inexperienced Foothills and our allies have partnered with East San Jose residents to shut the airport and repurpose its 180 acres for a community-centered imaginative and prescient that features parks and pure habitat. The FAA not too long ago indicated that Little League actions are an inappropriate use of the location. We agree that you will need to assist the league discover a new house the place kids can play safely, away from the airport. Supporting this can be a prudent step on the best way towards closing the airport to permit for eventual higher use for the neighborhood.
Juan Estrada
Advocacy Affiliate and Organizer, Inexperienced Foothills
Palo Alto
Academics do extra work
than essential letter implies
Jerry Mungai is at it once more, tackling his twin nemeses, lecturers’ pay and lecturers’ outlined profit pensions (“Time to rethink instructor compensation,” Letters to the Editor, Web page A6, Feb. 25). His laundry checklist of complaints facilities on the instructor work yr with the implication that lecturers do no work on days when faculty is just not in session.
As a 38-year veteran of the general public colleges, I can attest that for many lecturers the ‘days off’ are nonetheless workdays. Instructing is just not magic – it requires preparation. Once I taught math, I spent weekends getting ready classes; as a counselor, I spent nights and weekends writing letters of advice for school. Summers have been usually spent educating summer season faculty or taking school lessons.
As for the outlined profit pension, its “relic within the non-public sector” standing is testimony to the greed and avarice of our company world.
Mungai’s name for a “radical change” in instructor employment may not produce the outcomes he needs.
Kirch DeMartini
Saratoga
Battle ought to drive daring
transfer to renewables
Whereas the Russia/Ukraine conflict is multifaceted and sophisticated, there’s one issue that retains rising to the forefront of this humanitarian disaster — the worldwide volatility of oil and fuel that's occurring because of this battle.
This volatility indicators the pressing want for a transition to renewable power. Quite a few conflicts in latest historical past have been centered all over the world’s dependency on fossil fuels, the main explanation for local weather change.
However in contrast to throughout the oil disaster of the Seventies, we now have the know-how, ingenuity and drive to make the transition to renewables change into a actuality.
Weaning the world of fossil fuels by transitioning to wash power will significantly cut back worldwide conflicts going ahead. We now have the political will to do that.
Let President Biden, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Sen. Alex Padilla know that you really want daring local weather provisions to be included within the reconciliation invoice presently within the Senate.
Paula Danz
Los Altos
Putin can solely be
checked with air energy
America is enjoying into the fingers of Vladimir Putin. Putin threatened to assault Ukraine if Ukraine was allowed to affix NATO, which has not occurred, but they attacked anyway.
Attempting to placate an irrational madman doesn’t work. That is like when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain thought he may appease Adolf Hitler by permitting the cession of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
Putin’s quest for energy is insatiable and he has no respect for conciliation. NATO should act now and ship in troops and management Ukrainian air house earlier than it's too late.
Alan Duperrault
San Jose
Slicing ties with Russian
folks not useful
Re. “Longstanding South Bay-Russian sister-city ties might be severed amidst Ukraine battle,” March 3:
San Jose Metropolis Councilwoman Sylvia Area’s proposal could be tearing down as a substitute of constructing and cultivating friendship between San Jose and Ekaterinburg, Russia.
In Coventry, a city in England, 800 girls had their names embroidered on a tablecloth with the phrases “Little assist is healthier than large sympathy” and despatched it to the folks of Stalingrad. This sister metropolis relationship was formalized in 1944. The tablecloth is preserved in a museum in Stalingrad. On this spirit, we now have a number of different sister cities which have nurtured cultural change. We now have a sisterhood with Okayama, Japan. We now have acquired a plum tree that's blossoming in San Jose in all its magnificence. College students maintain digital conferences.
Energies might be higher channeled by writing letters praising these residents of Yekaterinburg who're risking their lives protesting Vladimir Putin’s conflict.
Juan Vargas
San Jose