3/12 Letters: It’s about time Tillis stepped up in climate change conversations.

Bad signs

As a new resident of Raleigh and a member of the Oaks & Spokes advocacy committee, I’ve watched the RDU quarry issue closely. I cannot convey how disappointed I was to read that the RDU Airport Authority (whose ultimate jurisdiction over this matter is legally questionable) recently decided (after only 15 minutes of deliberation and no public questions) to sell public land (and call it a lease) to a private company and allow them to mine rocks (a decidedly non-aeronautical purpose) next to a growing metropolitan area.

As an attorney who has lived in the swamp that is Washington DC, I am all too familiar with the incentive structures and institutions that would allow this to happen. The citizens of the Triangle area deserve better. We urge leaders from Raleigh, Durham, Wake and Orange counties to use any and all means at their disposal to vehemently oppose this transaction.

Matthew S Brockmeier

Raleigh

Lower carbon

It’s not a moment too soon for Sen. Thom Tillis to call for stimulating innovation by moving to a lower-carbon economy (“Republicans who couldn’t beat climate debate now seek to join it,” March 7 ). Voters are increasingly connecting the dots between natural disasters and climate change, and we increasingly demand that our legislators take action.

Whether we are galvanized by the goals of the Green New Deal or persuaded by economic policy analysis from conservative senior statesmen like George Schultz, it’s clear that the time is ripe and solutions are available. I welcome Tillis’ signal that he hears his very worried constituents.

In Congress, “shovel-ready” legislation needs support from all of North Carolina’s congressional delegation. The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act will shift the U.S. economy to a lower-carbon basis, while protecting American industry and American families from price disruptions. It’s been introduced in the House.

Melissa Malkin-Weber

Durham

Moot point

Retired broadcast journalist Tom Brokaw is quite certain that the President’s unwillingness to release his tax returns is the big story (“. The big story is that the President was elected by the people despite the fact that he didn’t release his returns. The President is a billionaire. It’s unfathomable to us that one so wealthy would seek political office in the first place. He certainly doesn’t need the job. The man has two or three houses nicer than the White House, for goodness’ sake.

Brokaw himself is a mere multi-millionaire, being worth some 75 million dollars. You can bet that Brokaw has a team of accountants in Washington or New York doing his personal tax returns and trying to pay as little tax as possible. Can the journalist Brokaw make sense of his own rather complicated tax returns? No, of course not. How much more absurd is it then to expect Washington politicians and journalists have the ability to decipher a billionaire’s decidedly more complicated returns? They can’t do it.

Robert Peele

Rocky Mount

Concerning precedent

Sen. Thom Tillis has indicated he will support a resolution to set aside the president’s emergency declaration thereby protecting separation pf Powers. Sen. Richard Burr has not. If senatorial rejection of the emergency declaration is vetoed, Burr can redeem himself by voting to overturn the veto. The Emergency Act contemplated a simple majority to overturn a president’s overreach but a Supreme Court decision puts that idea in jeopardy.

Overturning a threatened veto is not rejecting the president’s policy or a wall. It is protecting Democracy by protecting congressional power of the purse and institutional checks and balances. Madison noted that “security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others” (Federalist papers No. 51). Who knows what future presidents will consider an “emergency”?

Carl F. Goodman

Chapel Hill

This story was originally published March 18, 2019 at 10:33 AM with the headline "3/12 Letters: It’s about time Tillis stepped up in climate change conversations.."