Herald needs balanced coverage
Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, August 8, 2001
Your July 27 editorial, “Letters to the editor are page’s biggest attraction” encouraged me to write. I am concerned that most of your cartoons and editorials bash President Bush and the Republicans. The cartoon “Non Sequitur” invariably does the same and should be on the editorial page and not in the comic strips.
A case in point is a recent Rick Horowitz column about Vice President Cheney’s electric bill being paid by the Navy. Horowitz did not make it clear that the bill was usually not paid by the Vice President, but out of the Executive budget. In either case it is, and has been, paid by us taxpayers. In addition, the bill covered six months of Gore’s occupancy with his several teenagers and only one month of Cheney’s. Gore also made changes that increased energy use.
The June 14 article “’Have fun in the dark:’ Lake Stevens woman is energized, organizes block blackout party,” covered a voluntary “blackout” in one neighborhood in which it was suggested that digital clocks and VCRs should be unplugged. Such clocks take extremely little energy. My VCR takes 15 watts when it is in use and very little when not in use. The article should have said that the major users of energy are refrigerators, freezers, water heaters and ranges. I am sure people did not unplug these items during their “blackout.”
The use of heat pumps would greatly reduce the energy required to heat a house. We installed a heat pump 18 years ago and immediately reduced our energy usage by 40 percent. The PUD should subsidize more such additions.
In a July 7 article, “Larsen proposes funding for co-generation projects,” Rep. Rick Larsen encouraged the use of co-generation such as is installed at Kimberly-Clark. What makes that site economic is the fact that the mill has use in their production for their exhaust steam from the steam turbine. However, a combined cycle system using a gas turbine, a steam generator (using exhaust heat from the gas turbine) and a steam turbine generator would produce power at a reasonable rate.
Edmonds
