I am writing in response to Jim Dickert’s letter, “Coal plant would neutralize our eco-efforts” [Viewpoints, July 11]. Mr. Dickert is right, but for all the wrong reasons. The plant should not be built because it is economically non-competitive. When it was conceived, it might have been competitive, but advances in drilling has dropped the price of natural gas, making coal gasification only viable with large taxpayer subsidies. No private enterprise would build this with their own money.
Mr. Dickert, in typical “green religion” fashion attacks CO2. Double the CO2 to 700 and divide by 1,000,000 and the CO2 is still a minute percentage of the atmosphere. Like alcohol in gasoline, even after science tells us that the alcohol does more harm than good, the taxpayer subsidies continue. Send windmills to save the planet. Don’t let the killing of bats and birds (including eagles) deter this 16th-century technology from receiving taxpayer subsidies. How about DDT? Ban it so 1,000,000 Africans die of malaria a year. The unintended consequences of the green religion.
Once Oak Park was covered with ice. There were no SUVs emitting CO2 to melt the ice. How did it happen?
John E. Howell
Oak Park
