Thank you for your consideration and continued efforts to keep our community informed. While I commend the Oak Park Public Library for their efforts to spread the word on global warming via their screenings of An Inconvenient Truth (Jan. 13 and upcoming Feb. 17), I was flabbergasted recently to discover that not only is the main library’s parking garage heated, but a glitch in the door mechanism makes the doors stick open when temperatures are at their coldest, leaving the heaters working vigorously to warm up the 10-degree air blowing in from outside. Our tax dollars are being used to send heated air down Lake Street, while more dangerous carbon is being pumped into the atmosphere.
Two of the garage’s heating mechanisms are situated just inside the open doors, which I presume is meant to keep patrons from experiencing a gust of cold air as they collect or return their parking tickets. Is this really necessary? Everyone driving into the garage that day was dressed appropriately and could likely have survived the 20-second exposure to collect their ticket and the three-minute walk in an unheated garage. Unless the library is being powered by wind or solar energy, why not just shut the heat off in the garage?
It’s wonderful that the Oak Park Public Library is so willing to educate its patrons on climate change, but is anyone actually learning from Mr. Gore’s film?
Gina Lee Robbins
Oak Park