Fight climate change to help farmers
Lost in the political scuffle over the Paris climate accord are practical concerns. Georgia farmers are always on the knife’s edge. Is the weather too hot, too dry, too wet? This year’s unusually warm winter combined with a late frost has destroyed peach and blueberry crops. Farmers are bleeding money from these losses.
Climate scientists are warning us that the extreme weather that we’ve been experiencing is going to increase. Farmers need a hedge.
Earlier this year, my family received a proposal. A company wanted to plant row upon row of solar panels on our farmland in Illinois. Astoundingly, they offered to pay us twice what we were earning from growing corn and soybeans. Some of the most fertile land in Illinois, and they were guaranteeing us twice the revenue, year after year. Now, that’s a hedge. By setting aside some acres for a solar farm, farmers can more effectively deal with the financial risks of a changing climate. Farmers would simultaneously be addressing the underlying cause of a warming planet.
DON MCADAM, SANDY SPRINGS
Liberals want to police speech
A recent letter-writer wailed that we need a return of the old “fairness doctrine” vetoed by President Ronald Reagan because of increasing abuses (“Let’s bring back ‘Fairness Doctrine,” Readers Write, May 30). The writer claimed that this rule “ensured a reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views on issues of public importance” and specified these restrictions should apply to Fox News, Breitbart and talk radio. It was telling that this letter-writer did not mention that liberal media like CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and the AJC certainly do their share to stir up hate and discord and are routinely one-sided. It should be disturbing to all Americans that it is the liberal that lusts to silence the voice of open discussion and freedom of speech. Conservatives will strongly disagree with what those on the left say, but I have never heard a conservative try to outlaw what liberals have to say.
ERNEST WADE, LOGANVILLE
Justice more important than Republican party
As an Independent voter and apolitical writer, I have been critical of both political parties when it was deserved, regardless of whom it concerned. And thereby, I don’t have a witch in this Russian fairytale.
However, I do feel that GOP congressional members are trolling for President Trump, and while some opine occasionally, none of them have shown the courage to confront “The Russian Triangle” in a serious manner. For most of what the Republicans articulate is hyperbole that attempts to misdirect indefensible acts.
Notwithstanding, people should boycott CNN until Jeff Zucker is fired for allowing Trump surrogates to advocate the most nonsensical falsehoods and screwball analogies as if it were a Jerry Springer reality show, rather than an accredited news network. And every advertiser on Fox News should be boycotted as well until the network stops its dissemination of “fake” propaganda that seeks to exonerate President Trump rather than expose the “truth.”
Eventually, someone has to break the “red wall” or the GOP must answer for their witting complicity. Now is the time for the bold to emerge from the darkness.
JAMES L. NOBLES, ZEBULON
Violence coming from the right
Apparently Star Parker never read Aesop’s Fables, specifically the tale of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Her hyperbole in describing the violent acts of the “left wing” in her column (“Liberals, fighting freedom …” Opinion, May 24), suggests so. I remember no reports of blood flowing when students at Notre Dame walked out of their graduation because they disagreed with speaker Mike Pence. Nor do I remember any reports of EMTs called to Bethune-Cookman University because students booed and jeered at their commencement speaker, Betsy DeVos. Conversely, blood flowed at the right-wing bombing of a concert in London. A reporter was injured when he was thrown to the floor by a right-wing U.S. congressional candidate in Montana. The violence of the past weeks has come from the right, not the left.
PAT RHUDY, CARROLLTON
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