Letters: Oakland garbage | Richmond crisis

Send your letter to the editors using this form. Read more letters to the editor.

Let’s create incentives
Oakland garbage free

Reading on the humble, overly bureaucratic, and utterly inadequate response by the City of Oakland and the waste management industry to a major and serious public health problem (“Mulky Junk Pickup expanding to booming illegal garbage collection,” page B1, Nov. 15), I would do another Propose approach.

First, make all landfills in the Davis Street Landfill free. Second, you pay people a nominal amount, say $ 10, for every load of pickup trucks they drop on Davis Street. This would encourage dump trucks to take their loads to the facility and start a micro-business of people combing the streets for stuff they could haul to the landfill. If $ 10 doesn’t make significant shipments, increase the fee.

The city will no doubt argue that this would be an expensive undertaking. It should take into account the offsetting savings – the funds spent responding to 36,000 annual complaints, hiring additional staff, arranging pickups, and addressing quality of life and health issues related to dumping that were saved by this simple action could become.

David La Piana
Alameda

Progressive advice
leads Richmond astray

The November 11 article, “Richmond City Leadership in a State of Turbulence” (page B1) highlights the dysfunction of our city government.

The council – now devoid of a city attorney and city manager – is dominated by the Richmond Progressive Alliance, which operates along ideological lines and turns away from urgent needs such as basic city services, crime prevention, economic growth and good governance. Instead, the gang is claiming a resolution already passed by the previous city council at the city’s expense. They excuse an already exhausted police force, neglect economic development and do little to promote safe and clean neighborhoods. While the city’s industrial estates struggle with empty storefronts, rubbish and generally shabby conditions, the council largely neglects these concerns and instead speaks in favor of great ideological purity.

The city of Richmond had a lot to promise ten years ago. Things are seriously going downhill now.

Wallace Ravven
Richmond

Climate summit should
have increased the CO2 tax

In relation to the recent article by Seth Borenstein on the inadequacy of the recent Glasgow climate pact (“Experts Wanted More From Uniting Nations”, page A4, 11/15), there is a simple, market-based way of reducing our CO2 emissions quickly to reduce . It’s called a carbon tax.

A reasonable carbon tax (starting at $ 15 per tonne) would cut our emissions by 50% by 2030. If the income from the tax were returned to households, people would be protected from rising fossil fuel costs.

A CO2 tax could be part of the reconciliation law currently being negotiated in the Senate.

Trish Clifford
Richmond

Glasgow meeting not
make meaningful change

Was the climate summit really? Over 200 countries sent politicians, diplomats, environmentalists and activists to a “climate summit” in Glasgow (“Negotiators reach an agreement, but it does not solve a crisis”, page A1, November 14). Think of all of the private jets and huge convoys of cars polluting the very same environment they are supposedly so concerned about.

So what was the outcome of the summit? Well, they made an agreement to meet again next year with “stronger plans” to tackle climate change. They called it a “big” deal. So basically the summit was nothing more than a meeting to set up another meeting. I am sure that there were also many committees charged with setting up other committees.

Because of this, nothing is ever done. These people, who all suffer from a “do what I say, not like me” mentality, feel perfectly justified in all their excesses, but they literally do nothing for the common good. This summit was quite simply a boondoggle.

Joseph Gumina
Saint Charles

Biden’s climate fight
should start at home

Joe Biden promised to become climate president and wanted to establish the US as the international leader at the COP26 climate talks in Scotland. But leadership starts at home.

Biden can’t be a big game on the climate talks while approving fossil fuel projects in indigenous, black, and low-income communities. The most important thing he can do to show US leadership is to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Biden can use his existing executive powers to halt fossil fuel projects, just like he did with Keystone XL. From drilling public land to pipelines, refineries, petrochemicals and exports, he can instruct his authorities to decline permits for fossil fuel projects with the stroke of a pen today.

We deserve a world beyond fossil fuels. And Biden can deliver it with measures by the executive to build not only better, but also fossil-free.

Zoe Edington
Monterey

Letters: Oakland garbage | Richmond crisis | Carbon tax | Little accomplished | Biden’s fight