State agencies are underfunded
Our governor has taken some pride in downsizing, but his Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is reportedly short funding for 100 positions. The Division of Natural Resources (DNR) and Forestry, even his Department of Health and Human Resources, do not have the funds and people to protect citizens and the environment.
The DEP just missed out on the collection of $20 million in fines on Massey Energy that the slow-to-act federal government collected instead. West Virginia was even slower.
This agency has not had the personnel to review the obligatory industry discharge reports for violations, let alone levy and collect fines. The West Virginia Public Workers Union says, "Year after year, the DEP has failed to enforce the environmental standards of state law." If we do get finally the needed protective law, those who would foul our land and water and the very air we breathe know that they and their political friends can see to it that these agencies are underfunded.
We citizens must ask our legislators, even our governor, to remedy this situation. They cannot imagine we would not be willing to pay for vigilant inspections and vigorous enforcement that are essential to the protection of our families. They should be our champions of the public interest, not the interest of the polluter.
Do ask, and see what they will do to fund these agencies so polluters are held accountable.
Donald C. Gasper
Buckhannon, W.Va.
Conservatives need to know science
There is no such thing as money. Neither is there energy. This realization can give insight into the problems we talk about using the ideas of money and energy. A pile of coal, or a red hot clinker: Energy? No. Dollars in your wallet or numbers in your bank account. Money? Maybe, but only by law.
Energy is an accounting system used by physicists, chemists and biologists to keep track of the states of matter. Money is an accounting system used to keep track of the states of society, or the economy right down to the individual. The problem is that energy is thought of as something that exists on its own and if we could get it, things would be better.
Corresponding to the flourishing of life as we know it today has been the separation of oxygen from its carbon by plants and solar radiation. Then, the removal of carbon from the biosphere by burial due to weathering at the surface of the earth in addition to the geological rock cycle caused by the flow of heat from the center of the earth. The use of fossil fuels are a short circuit in this process and may generate change at a rate seen by life only after the impact of a large meteoroid.
You can't create energy out of thin air, and no Yankee ingenuity, technology or science is going to do so. Any technological marvel of today is trivial compared to the energy problem. I am a conservative and agree politically with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, etc., but these guys are science-illiterate.
If you really care about conservatism, you'd better start studying your chemistry, physics, biology and geology. Math is necessary. If you learn your science through preachers like the above, you are an embarrassment to conservatism.
Don Silver
Huntington
7-day Archive
