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Move up deadline
to be diesel-free
Be Diesel-Free by ’33? Good idea, Bay Area Air Quality Management District, but that’s 12 years away. Let’s speak up for the thousands of people who must live near the freeways and breathe in the heavily polluted air every minute of their days that heavy-duty trucks, trains and ships generate. Let’s push for a new goal of “Diesel-Free by ’23”. In fact, the Air District’s own rules require the most effective protections with the quickest implementation.
The health impact of diesel particulate matter, a potent carcinogen, can penetrate deeply into our lungs causing cardiovascular, pulmonary, and other health impacts as these vehicles carry groceries, clothing, and other merchandise to fill our stores’ shelves and freezers.
Our Black, Brown and immigrant communities don’t deserve to wait any longer for clean air. Let’s urge the Air Quality Board to push for much more rapid changes, which are possible, through a diesel-free by ’23 campaign.
Ellen Beans
Moraga
With COVID, ‘personal’
choices affect everyone
Some say “my body my choice” when it comes to COVID-19 precautions. That is a narrow-minded approach to personal and public health.
First, they must acknowledge the easy transmission of COVID-19 and the worldwide pandemic. Then recognize that the air expelled from our lungs may transmit this virus – regardless of any symptoms or the lack thereof.
Your body is not able to choose not to transmit the virus. Therefore not masking in public and eschewing the vaccine is akin to defecating into the communal water supply. We learned long ago that cholera spreads that way.
Better for everyone if we all follow the science.
Ed Chainey
Richmond
Library offers example
of sound infrastructure
While we argue the definition of “infrastructure” in America it is appropriate to give thunderous applause to the Pleasant Hill Library.
Public libraries provide unlimited access to all types of literature and educational resources – available for free to anyone regardless of income or background. Residents owe a shout-out to the staff of our library – operating in temporary, cramped quarters at the rear end of City Hall made even more difficult with restrictions imposed by the pandemic and budget.
As a senior citizen on a limited income, Pleasant Hill Library allows me the quality of life good books provide. Many thanks to our hardworking, patient and cheerful library staff. They are the greatest.
Janet Clark
Pleasant Hill
Without abortion, women
women pay lifetime price
A man can impregnate a woman in a moment, be it true love, rape, incest or just lust. A woman is bound for life.
What authority does any man have to say what a woman’s reproductive rights are? Especially now, with the entire Earth in peril due to climate change, putting into question our ability to feed and provide clean water and basic shelter to the population we already have, much less adding more, possibly unwanted, humans into the mix.
It’s just not right.
Karen Leary
Dublin
Wrong on economics;
wrong on weather
I read with amusement Max Ritter’s letter, “Krugman is as reliable as the weatherman.” (Page A6, Sept. 10) Mr. Ritter is painfully incorrect on two counts.
First, his inferences reflect back to the tired and failed baloney so revered 40 years ago by elitists spewing the corrupt concepts of “Reaganomics” all the while continuing to spread fear and paranoia that “the sky is falling” as a result of the right-wing boogeyman, socialism.
Second, his opinion of weathermen, too, is about 40-years passé. Like with Krugman, I find the weathermen of today incredibly accurate.
John Ebert
San Ramon
Nation’s divisions began
long before 9/11
A front-page article in the Sept. 11 East Bay Times (“Then and now”) asked: What has happened to us in the last 20 years? I’d suggest that the unity after Sept. 11, 2001, was really only a temporary interruption of a division that had already been building for decades in America between the progressive Left and conservative Right.
This division causes us to see many things in completely opposite ways, as either good or bad. This includes abortion, being LGBTQ, seeing the world as being divided between oppressors and victims, seeing climate change as an “existential crisis”, and looking to government as a powerful force for social change.
But what puts you on one side or the other? I’d say it depends on this: Do you believe in a higher power or higher law or believe that we define right and wrong? What will really matter in the end is which side is right.
Christopher Andrus
Dublin
Column reflects ideological
‘road less followed’
So refreshing to see a well-written Victor David Hansen column about the recall in your newspaper (“California recall election may reverse state ideology,” Page A7, Sept. 10).
You should keep up the Other Opinion section in the newspaper. I might even consider renewing my subscription. Taking the road less traveled sometimes opens people’s minds.
Alice Sullivan
Hayward
