Letters to the Editor

Stay connected

The neighbors behind us are on a different power grid. They envy us.

There is a glow from our family-room windows each night. They wish they had it.

We enjoy hours of uninterrupted entertainment. They cannot get our programming.

They try to go about life as normally as possible after Sandy.

So do we.

Sandy caused us to sit in the family room at night and warm ourselves by the fire. We talked, laughed, and connected -without power - in a way that is enviable.

Lauren Keatley, Blue Bell, keatleylk@aol.com

Thanks, Peco

I want to express my appreciation to Peco for the great job it did in keeping us powered up during Hurricane Sandy. We had two brief outages, but that was it. Way to go, Peco!

Janet Summers, Philadelphia

Bury the lines

Hurricane Sandy knocked my power out for about 60 hours. The storm's powerful winds knocked over a tree and pulled down the power lines that supply my house and hundreds of others. Who would have thought this could happen?

Millions lost power this week and many more will suffer in the future because the power industry is unwilling to secure one of the most important portions of its infrastructure. They yell, "It will cost too much." But how much have this and all the other outages caused by snow, ice, wind, and auto accident cost in terms of income and inconvenience?

The time has come to bury every power line in the nation.

Ron Stoloff, Blue Bell, rstoloff@comcast.net

Climate change

With this week's historic hurricane, which has been so destructive, why was the issue of climate change not even discussed during this presidential campaign. The GOP and oil companies may have won this battle for now - by continued denial and getting this topic off the national agenda. But future generations, wildlife, agriculture, and life in general will suffer because of further delays in action. How stupid are we to actually see and feel climate change in our lives over the past decades around the globe and think it is not happening?

What kind of shadowy people are preventing real changes from happening? And why have the media been mostly absent from investigating and shouting the facts and realities. This is a much bigger issue than the economy, jobs, and health care. This is about life on Earth.

Climate change - because of humans - is a done deal, and those who are denying the real facts and preventing any changes in decreasing our contributions to climate change through action will someday be considered by future generations as either delusional, misguided, or truly evil and self-centered.

Walt Hug, Birdsboro

Time to act

The scenes of cataclysm in New York and New Jersey that we are seeing every night on TV come from a real-life horror movie that we have created. What happened in New York is what climate scientists have been predicting for years. What terrorists have failed to do - flood the tunnels and close down the city - Frankenstorm did.

The seas are rising and becoming more violent. Before Mitt Romney mocked President Obama's commitment to slow the rise of the sea level, I had some hope that we were about to unite behind a movement to save our planet.

We are experiencing climate change, and there will be more storms, and worse, as the seas warm and rise, as we lose arctic summer ice, and as the world heats up. We cannot wait for more storms of the century. It is time to tell Congress to make the world safer for our descendants. We need to start to stop consuming fossil fuels, the driver of climate change.

A carbon tax would reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and support the growth of sustainable electrical generation - wind, solar, and geothermal - as well as build a national smart grid, generating long-term, well-paying jobs and returning manufacturing to this country. For the sake of our children, it is time to act.

Ronald Fischman, Philadelphia

Campaign money

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have legislation mandating that every dollar spent on a political campaign be matched, penny for penny, to advance education in the United States? Imagine. The billions being spent for this year's presidential campaigns, matched as suggested, would provide necessary funds to our impoverished schools ("Election funding surges to $2B," Oct. 26).

The result would be less time and money wasted on rhetoric and annoying media ads of questionable value and, more importantly, a stronger, brighter America with more knowledgeable future voters who would be able to choose, with a better-educated eye, the best candidate.

Betty Layberger, Bryn Mawr

Popular vote

All of the news coverage about the nine all-important swing states and their highly coveted Electoral College votes that will decide the upcoming election leaves me and others feeling totally disenfranchised. Maybe only the nine all-important swing states should vote on Tuesday and all of the other states can sit home and watch Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and the others elect the president.

There is an ongoing campaign to address this issue. The National Popular Vote Bill would guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most national popular votes. According to the movement's website, nationalpopularvote.com, the measure has already been enacted into law in New Jersey, Maryland, the District of Columbia, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Hawaii. What about Pennsylvania and New York?

Let's ditch the archaic Electoral College system and let all voters choose our future president by a national popular vote.

W. Mills, Palmyra