Inbox

Heroes of the Environment
Thank you for your special issue celebrating the heroes who are striving for a cleaner environment [Oct. 6]. They are truly deserving of our admiration and help. However, they all are swimming against the tide of world population growth. All of us are morally bound to support the principle that poor people’s living conditions must be improved. Yet if we do this and Earth’s population continues to rise, resources will be consumed and waste generated at an ever faster rate. What are we thinking? The planet of the apes is no longer science fiction. We are living on it.
André Brossé,
Vosselaar, Belgium

If trillions of dollars can magically appear for financial bailouts, why not for the climate change crisis?
Marshall Rowe,
Newcastle, New South Wales

“Environmental Hero” Shai Agassi claims that electric cars produce no carbon emissions. But the electricity to run such a car must come from somewhere. Unless the car happens to be in a nation that draws its power entirely from renewable sources (sadly not the case anywhere), electric cars serve only to shift the location where fossil fuels are burned.
Ronan Evans,
Jerrabomberra, New South Wales

For forty years I have been recycling, making compost from my lawn clippings and household refuse. I have planted some 300 trees. I’ve replaced all my light bulbs with energy-saving bulbs. I conserve water and electricity by boiling the kettle only three times a day, keeping the hot water in a vacuum flask. I turn the hot-water heater on only to heat water for a shower. In doing all this, I tell myself I am helping to solve the world’s environmental problems. But this will never be enough so long as overpopulation continues. While I say bravo to all your environmental heroes, I know that unless they are helping to stem population growth all their efforts in the long run will be in vain.
Johann van Venrooy,
Cape Town

Your issue was truly impressive in its global coverage, and the ideas it canvassed have not only great significance for humanity but huge economic potential. It should be distributed to all the world’s secondary schools, for that is where the seeds of future action will be sown.
Gordon Rabey,
Wellington

You left out one of Australia’s environmental heroes, Senator Bob Brown, of the Greens party.
Colin Kennard,
Brisbane, Queensland

Bailout Fallout
This notion of a government bailout is not a question of liberal vs. conservative but one of right or wrong [Oct. 6]. This one is wrong. The burden will fall on the people who need this money much more than greedy executives do. The executives should go down, just as any of us would have to. I realize the economic implications, but this country was built on sacrifice, and we may have to sacrifice again.
Nicholas Gamba,
Sayreville, New Jersey

Inside-the-beltway representatives had better straighten up. With this kind of leadership, who needs Congress?
Joe Myers,
Mesa, Arizona

I never thought I’d be agreeing with Republican Senator Richard Shelby from Alabama, but my assessment of the current bank bailout conforms with his response: No! Invest in infrastructure, home weatherization, worker-retraining, green-collar jobs and whatever will move us away from our oil addiction. Rather than doubling down on our already obscene national debt, we should face up to letting the chips fall and reorganizing our lives and economy around a sustainable paradigm.
Bruce Garver,
Murrieta, California

The U.S. government should provide the $700 billion as loans to companies that want it — which would have to be repaid with interest to the Treasury. To qualify for such a loan, the receiving company should be barred from granting executive bonuses or paying dividends to investors until the loan (and interest) is repaid. This would infuse the needed money into the system and free up credit markets. But in the long run, it would cost taxpayers nothing.
Robert P. Hebbel,
North Oaks, Minnesota

It amazes me that nobody seems to have asked the simple question, “What will happen to banks and other financial institutions if a large number of subprime loans default?” Or was it only greed that made everyone ignore the disaster that would occur if the markets went south?
Frederik Steenbuch,
Oslo

The institutions the government is bailing out are failing because of their greed and corruption. I and millions like me face the possibility of losing our homes because of this greed and corruption. Is the government going to bail us out? No. Many of us have tried making a living by starting our own businesses. Many of us failed. Will the government bail us out? No. This is not a question of liberal vs. conservative but of right vs. wrong. The failing institutions should be allowed to go down, just as any small business would have to do.
Nicholas Gamba,
Neptune, New Jersey

Before this latest crisis, investment banks and their executives were hailed by the media as heroes. Now they are suddenly cursed as villains. When the big blame game is played, the role of the media should be included on the score sheet.
Roger Almeberg,
Helsingborg, Sweden

I’m infuriated that American taxpayers are bailing out corporate gamblers. They will never change their irresponsible behavior as long as we keep picking up the tab. Our amazing country has been reduced to a welfare state for the wealthy.
Jason Graham,
Oakland, California

I am no economist, but it strikes me as imprudent for the government to bail out Wall Street because it nationalizes, or socializes, free enterprise, supports investors in the assisted companies at the expense of the general taxpayer, and sets a precedent for other troubled industries to ask for government handouts. This is welfare for the wealthy at the expense of the middle class.
Daniel Spiteri,
San Jose, California

Wall Street didn’t sell out America; easy mortgages, no-money-down plasma TVs, trade and budget deficits all existed prior to collateralized debt obligations. The reality is that the entire U.S. economy has been one big fractional-reserve Ponzi scheme for the past 25 years, with bubble after bubble fed by prime lending rates that have not matched the true rate of inflation. Wall Street merely set up massive side bets on the whole scheme and then failed to get out early. The last domino will be the rejection of our currency by shocked foreign debtors. There is only one piece of investment advice anyone needs, and it has been accurate for over 5,000 years: buy gold. Gold has always represented the principle that you can’t get something for nothing; something that America forgot a long time ago.
Dan McCoy,
Reno, Nevada

Treasury secretary Henry Paulson did not foresee the consequences of the subprime lending crisis, so how can he be so sure what the consequences would be if there were no bailout? All he wants from the rescue package is to assist the owners of banks and brokerage firms. If this were not the case, he would have stipulated that every company must hand over a specific number of shares to the government for every bailout dollar it receives.
Colin Segal,
Sydney

One of the firms that will be directly helped by the bailout is Goldman Sachs. Paulson, the man who is leading the bailout, is a former Goldman Sachs CEO, and mega-investor Warren Buffet, who called the bailout “the right thing” for Congress to do, had just bought a huge stake in Goldman Sachs. These are clear signs that the big money-men are likely to turn the bailout to their own profit. Banks and firms that bet on paper securities not backed by real assets should be left to die on their own swords.
Sivaswamy Mohanakrishnan,
Auckland

We urgently need a Kyoto protocol to address financial climate change, fight the greed-house effect and reverse the decline of ethics. We must curtail the emissions of toxic investment funds and promote and reward the development of sound financial products for the sake of global economic health.
Ray Moser,
Lausanne, Switzerland

I am only 37, and my wife and I have never earned more than $80,000 in a single year. Yet we have already paid for two homes. I am angry about giving money to irresponsible individuals who borrowed far more than they could repay. They have driven home prices to historic levels by creating what amounts to artificial demand. We played by the rules: we paid our mortagages off. Some 25% of subprime housing borrowers did not. So who gets punished? People like my wife and me.
Colin Buckley,
Albuquerque, New Mexico

Diminishing Returns
Your history item on Ford’s model T indicated that when it was first introduced in 1908 its fuel efficiency was 13-21 miles per gallon [Oct. 6]. According to the website of the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, in 2006 the average U.S. passenger car got 22.4 miles to the gallon. It seems we haven’t got very far in 100 years.
Jeff DeVito,
Bound Brook, New Jersey

Campaigning for Obama?
In “The Lying Game,” Joe Klein deployed his facts selectively to argue that Senator John McCain is running a dishonest campaign [Sept. 29]. Wow — so Barack Obama hasn’t told any lies? Klein then predicted that things would change in the debates, since “it isn’t easy to tell lies when your opponent is standing right next to you.” Oops! After that column appeared, 70 million people watched and heard Vice-Presidential candidate Joe Biden tell 15 documented falsehoods, including the claim that he regularly patronizes Katie’s Restaurant, in Wilmington, Delaware, which has been closed for years. Klein’s idea of the “unwritten rules” of campaign rhetoric seems to be that the media have the right to selectively use facts to form public opinion and smear the candidate they oppose.
Kent Doss,
Tubac, Arizona