Electric bills
Bjorn Lomborg blames clean energy policies for Britain’s sky-high electric bills (“Lomborg: Increasing energy costs isn’t the answer,” Feb 5). Nonsense. Britain’s prices spiked because it’s hooked on gas, and when Russia invaded Ukraine, gas prices exploded. Gas dependence, not wind turbines, is the culprit.
Lomborg skips the fact that solar and wind are now the cheapest sources of new electricity in most of the world, cheaper than coal or gas, even without subsidies. The answer to high bills isn’t doubling down on the fuel that caused the crisis. And his call for more “innovation” before we act is a way to sound reasonable while keeping us chained to fossil fuels that jack up our bills every time there’s a war or a pipeline squeeze.
Here in Massachusetts, Vineyard Wind was on track to power 400,000 homes with cheaper, homegrown electricity and good union jobs when the Trump administration tried to kill it, citing bogus “national security” grounds that four federal judges have rejected. Lomborg says he wants affordable energy. So do working families. That means more clean power, not less, and a government that stops blocking it.
Frederick Hewett
Cambridge
SAVE Act
It’s time for Congress to pass the SAVE Act. Showing a picture ID in order to vote is common sense. A majority of Americans, over 83%, want voter ID according to the latest Gallup poll. If that many Americans want it, why does Chuck Schumer keep saying it is an abomination and Jim Crow on steroids? That is a tired lie that Democrat elites keep repeating.
What is disheartening to me is that Senate Majority leader John Thune has been holding up a vote on the SAVE Act for over 300 days. Why the hold up? Secure elections will at least stop the vitriol between voters about stolen elections. And, then, politicians can get down to the business of actually governing.
Donald Houghton
Quincy
Epstein files
Jeffrey Epstein was an execrable man, a truly despicable character. But he also mastered skills that many morally superior individuals would dearly love to marshal. He had, for instance, a range of friends within the worlds of finance, academia, politics and philanthropy that few other rolodexes could muster, and when he called, they answered.
I don’t think for one moment that all of his contacts knew of his depredations at the time, and yet many good people are now sullied, the stink ineradicable. The pursuit of the Epstein files has been pushed in a fashion unbecoming a serious investigation and appears like a helter-skelter rush to the bottom, irrespective of the cost to innocents caught in political crosshairs.
Paul Bloustein
Cincinnati, Ohio
