Talk back

Readers respond to Work & Money and Business section coverage

BY ALL MEANS, TALK POLITICS AT WORK

Your Jan. 20 article ("Politics in the Office Not Always Acceptable," Work&Money) ended on an unfortunate note, with management consultant Karissa Thacker's paranoid advice to keep your mouth shut about politics in the workplace. An important piece of democratic citizenship suffers when employees exercise the excessive caution the article advised. In an age of Fox News and YouTube, an honest conversation with someone who holds a different point of view is hard to come by. The workplace is one of the rare forums where such encounters can happen. Rather than look to penalize employees for their political expression, happily, a practice that is the rare exception, employers should encourage workers to talk openly about their values and beliefs and consider respectfully those of their co-workers. This would help rebuild the open, free democratic culture we cherish.

Andrew J. Perrin, sociology professor

UNC-Chapel Hill

WHAT ABOUT NEWSPAPER WASTE?

Your story on keeping plastic bags out of the landfills ("More stores offer alternatives to plastic bags," Jan. 23, Business) was one of at least two articles in today's paper related to the environment (the other linking global warming to fewer hurricanes). The N&O often features stories on the environment, but to be balanced, The N&O should be giving equal time to an issue that is not often found in print newspapers: the environmental impact of the newspaper itself. When you consider all the fallen trees, and all the energy, emissions, and waste generated during production and delivery of the paper, you've got quite a mess. While The N&O states on its Web site that about half of its distributed newsprint is collected and recycled, the other half of this enormous biomass ends up in landfills.

The N&O should actively encourage its subscribers to cancel their print subscriptions and instead view the news on The N&O online. The Web site is already publishing the local news, and the environmental footprint of publishing and reading news online is next to nothing. While we're still waiting for technology to bring us clean energy and cheap, abundant water, the technology already exists to send the print newspaper along the same inevitable path as The Pony Express and the telegraph. As a voice of environmental conservation, The N&O should leverage its front page to be a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem.

Jake Talridge

Raleigh

DOWNSIDES OF BUILDING AT CLIFFSIDE PLANT

Thanks for writing such a complete article on Cliffside ("Duke Energy can build at Cliffside," Business, Jan. 30). I needed some statistics to compare the "Chamber of Commerce" sunshine numbers on Cliffside and the reality. And there they were. Here is one that could have been elaborated on in your article. Yes, building the coal plant will create 1,600 jobs, but they would all be temporary construction jobs. When these workers leave, according to what I heard in Rutherfordton at the public hearing, do you know the grand total of permanent jobs? Thirty. That's right, this is an automated plant so it takes very few people to run it. But at the hearing and in all the press releases, all you hear is 1,600.

Their other big bait and switch is "all the dirty plants that will be shut down." Yep, and they are increasing emissions of carbon dioxide 33 percent. And at the same time, there isn't an elected official in sight that will touch energy conservation, land use and transit beyond a campaign slogan. All I can say is there must be a lot of cash floating around.