Letters: A responsibility to support the RGGI; Clear choice on vaccinations, masks
A responsibility to support the RGGI
This July, floods ravaged the eastern part of Pennsylvania, destroying family homes and leaving citizens stranded. While floods have always been a part of life, meteorology proves that climate change increases the severity and frequency of these events.
Luckily, solutions to climate change will improve both the economy and public health. Despite the pandemic, the renewable energy industry grew 45% in 2020, providing well-paying, permanent jobs. Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrates that carbon pollution leads to pulmonary and cardiovascular disease in the northeast. Reducing carbon pollution will save lives and preserve precious public health resources.
Climate change is no longer an issue for hippies or impoverished countries on the other side of the world. Climate change is impacting our state, our economy, and our health.
Each citizen has a responsibility to act on this issue. Call your state representative today and tell them you support sustainable energy and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).
Clear choice on vaccinations, masks
If the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers are correct, then those who choose to wear a mask and get vaccinated are merely inconveniencing themselves a bit. But if the people who were masks and get vaccinated are correct, then the virus will continue to spread, and many more people will become seriously ill or die. It seems pretty clear to me which choice is better for all of us.
Unsaid connection to student vaccination requirements
More than 500 U.S. colleges and universities require students returning to campus this fall to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. These are small colleges and large universities, including Big Ten members Rutgers, Maryland, Illinois, Northwestern, Indiana, and Michigan.
In Pennsylvania, more than 35 private colleges require student vaccinations.
However, neither Penn State, including University Park and all its campuses, nor any of the Pennsylvania State Universities, requires their students to be vaccinated. That’s over 30 towns and cities in Pennsylvania with thousands of students potentially unvaccinated.
This is a growing public health disaster that will put students, faculty, staff, and residents of these communities at risk for the virus and the delta variant. This is pure lunacy — it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to understand why this is happening.
It’s not a coincidence that each of Pennsylvania’s State colleges and universities receives funding from our Republican-controlled legislature. Of course, the legislators never actually forbid our colleges from issuing vaccination mandates. They don’t have to. The college presidents know where their money comes from.
Looked at another way, if legislative leaders such as Jake Corman and Kerry Benninghoff wanted Pennsylvania colleges to require vaccinations, they would have shouted it from the rooftops. But they didn’t, and so they will be complicit if COVID cases and deaths increase in college towns across the state.
Corman and Benninghoff may play dumb about why we have no student vaccination requirements, but all should know who is guilty when more deaths occur.
Calling out hypocrites
An excellent and very informative letter from Linda Barton of July 29 disclosed July 4 statements of Keller, Thompson, Joyce, Kelly, Perry, Reschenthaler and Smucker, indicating the blatant hypocrisy of them. I would only add to her comments, the famous phrase of Shakespeare, “to thine own self be true.” I must assume that the hypocrites never felt constrained to abide by that moral imperative.