While making fun of Joel Dyer’s piece on fracking (“Can you hear us now?” DyerTimes, Dec. 6), Charlie Danaher offered zero data to refute Dyer’s predictions or rhetoric. I’m inclined to go with Dyer’s carefully researched points and dismiss Danaher’s dismissal.
If you think fracking is safe, prove it before drilling another well anywhere. Even if it’s perfectly safe, fracking permanently takes millions of gallons of water per well out of the cycle in a drought, and releases tons of carbon and methane into the atmosphere in an accelerating climate change nightmare. Natural gas is really cheap right now. Why don’t we leave it where it is until prices are better, water is more plentiful, and carbon in the atmosphere is under 350 PPM.
E. Scott MacInnis/Longmont
Thank you so much for this thoughtful article. What you outline is right on. We must fight this.
Margi Ness/via Internet
My memories of Sandy Hook
On Dec. 14, 1962, at 9:30 a.m., I was in my kindergarten class at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Like most days, we would have been having cookies and milk about that time. Before the teacher lowered the shades for our nap, we could look across the playground at the woods beyond and dream of carefree afternoons to come exploring those woods. Even with all the excitement of Christmas coming, I was more excited than most because in two more days, I would be the very grown up age of 5!
For the next 50 years, other children would eat milk and cookies as they begin going down the path that would be their life in one of the nicest places to start life in. On Dec. 14, 20 children lost their chance to grow up in Sandy Hook when their lives were ended by bullets. Unlike me, they will not get to win the kite flying contest with a homemade newspaper kite, play kickball on that playground, plant trees along the driveway, make science fair planets in the gym or learn to read the big wooden plaque with gold letters above the cafeteria entrance that had words from another life shortened by bullets.
The plaque read, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
Today is the day that you can do something for your country. You can ask President Obama and your representatives to renew the assault weapons ban — you can ask that mental health services be less expensive, more socially acceptable, and easier to get than a gun — and you can be a little nicer to every person you meet from this day forward.
Paul Kolesnikoff, Sandy Hook Elementary School Alumnus/via Internet
Season’s greetings
I do not celebrate “holiday.” I celebrate Christmas!
And Boulder is unrelenting in its quest to totally obliterate any mention of Christmas.
Thus I do not shop or buy local. Why should I when I’m made to feel a pariah when I dare mention Christmas or greet someone “Merry Christmas?”
Phyllis Pappu/Boulder
Judas Obama
Germany 1939 began with disarmament of the populace. What followed was genocide of the Jews! The signing of the U.N. agreement to take firearms from the people is an open invitation to foreign countries to take the United States over. It is simple, but those that put the President back into power are not seeing the forest for the trees! You hold out your hand and you are paid for doing nothing. On the other side he gives billions to CEO’s that have done nothing but give he and his spineless congress millions back! I wont tell you that the other man running was that good either, but for God sake people use your head and look at what has happened the last four years! It is not going to get better for anyone but the rest of the world. We have a leader and his name is Judas! Fall in line and go to slaughter. A government that has no fear of the population is a government to be feared. Telling it how I see it!
Dave Graham
