It gives one pause: An alderman elected by the vote of less than 10 percent of the Carrboro electorate gets a quarter-page in The Citizen (“Getting our bearings toward making things better,†1/28/10) to promote an agenda that has been discredited and whose perpetrators are in the process of losing their jobs and being prosecuted. It’s as if The Citizen thinks that the other 90 percent of Carrboro-ites might be interested in his outdated and misguided opinion.
You have to love the irony of James Hansen being greeted in Chapel Hill by snow and temperatures in the teens…. Despite revelations of data exclusion, data destruction, manipulation of simulations, suppression of conflicting hypotheses, just plain bad science and bad scientists just plain behaving badly and maybe even criminally, the new-ice-age/global-warming/climate-change adherents continue to worship at the alter. My favorite finding of the stonewalled, manipulated data from NASA and James Hansen is: “It’s as if Minneapolis stopped reporting and its average temperature was extrapolated from readings in St. Louis.†Ever been to Minneapolis in the winter?
As far as Carrboro’s record on the environment, let’s review:
Carrboro’s aldermen and women finally got cardboard into the recycling mix last year, but they continue picking up yard debris (otherwise known as composting material) and transferring it to the landfill, where it is turned into composting material and resold to the homeowner (who placed it on the street for pickup in the first place), who takes it back home. They are also proceeding to pave over as much of Carrboro as they can with unnecessary sidewalks and a paved path through the Adams Tract. They have successfully created a myriad of bicycle lanes that cyclists shun in preference of the roadway. Implementation of their “connectivity†policy results in less connectivity and more unnecessarily driven miles per year. And their idea of beautification is to populate the side of the roads with signs, signs, everywhere a sign; most of which are unnecessary and a distraction.
In a world where NASA is now a climate research organization and the Department of Transportation is providing funding for environmental projects, I guess it makes sense that Carrboro aldermen and women are the voices of environmentalism. I can’t wait for Transition Carrboro-Chapel Hill’s “big bangâ€; bound to be as trite and predictable as the clichés describing it.
GORDON COOK
Carrboro