Readers Write: Dec. 21

P-cards should be controlled or abolished

Once again we are hearing about the abuse of a P-Card (“Ex-GBI official told to repay $60,000,” News, Dec. 12). For three years, this accused thief was furnishing her house with expensive items and charging it to the taxpayers. Wasn’t anyone checking all these altered receipts? A major question is why there are so many state employees who have P-cards in the first place. Do they all have to buy their own stationery, ink, laptops, desks? Is there anyone periodically auditing all these accounts? How many are busily charging the taxpayers even now and have yet to be exposed? P-card usage should be controlled, limited or abolished, or at the very least they should have to prove the absolute necessity for having one.

JUDITH MCCARTHY, ATLANTA

Bipartisan effort needed to stop climate change

AJC’s Sunday subscriber bonus section begins with the article “Wildfires’ long term health effects.” It covers the unfortunate, too-late reality of climate change consequences: “Nine times more Western forestland is burning in large fires each year on average now than 30 years ago … And that means worse is to come.”

In spite of past successes by the Environmental Protection Agency’s effective reduction of pollutant controls, the unharnessed culprit of increasing carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has brought us to a “climate swerve” moment as Robert Jay Lifton refers to it.

Reality has hit. Climate change caused by fossil fuel usage is attacking the planet’s biodiversity to the extent that humans — not just polar bears — are threatened.

Like billions of brother and sister humans with families and hopes for their family’s futures, we all need and want effective leadership to price carbon. We need a bipartisan solution to stop rising carbon dioxide.

BOB JAMES, ATLANTA