Letters

Last week, Gerald Rosengarten [“The Future Is Unknown,” Letters, September 7] took issue with my letter from August 31 concerning climate change hysteria and resistance to a constructive dialogue on its economic and social costs in order to promote a narrative of imminent doom. He dismisses the work of cited scientists John Christy and Roy Spencer as quacks, though they were awarded NASA’s prestigious award for scientific achievement.

Mr. Rosengarten also takes issue with another scientist, Dr. Myron Ebell, who advised Donald Trump to leave the much flawed Paris Accords. Trump, as well as George Bush before him, who withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, recognized the financial burdens being placed on the United States while the world’s top polluters, like India and China, were allowed to continue. I’m reminded of Galileo being “vehemently suspect of heresy,” or the ridicule heaped on Copernicus.

Mr. Rosengarten claims to have been an environmentalist for over 15 years. I personally designed and built passive solar homes starting in the late 1970s — I have him beat by several decades. Passive solar is an extremely efficient means to provide a low-cost, low-impact energy profile on a home that is affordable to everyone.

I commend his use of geothermal heating, but it has a considerable higher cost of entry that may put it beyond the reach of many home buyers. Heavily subsidized solar also requires higher initial cost and could be beyond the reach of many. Without solar subsidies, it still may not be worth the financial and heavy social costs in production and future waste management.

Solar is hardly a panacea when one fairly considers its total benefit cost ratio and the vulnerability to catastrophic failure by going 100 percent renewable energy, read as “all electric,” while ignoring the advantages of combined energy strategies that include fossil fuels. One only needs to consider the Northeast blackouts of 1965 and 2003 to realize our extreme vulnerability, especially in winter, by putting all our eggs in an all-electric basket.

Finally, Mr. Rosengarten takes issue with the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, a group of doctors of infectious diseases, epidemiologists and public health scientists numbering in the tens of thousands, for challenging the physical and mental health aspects of COVID-19 policies that so severely affected the world for over two years. Mandates and lockdowns created widespread depression, increased suicide and extreme financial hardship for far too many in order to protect against a virus that had less than a 1 percent fatality rate. Closing our schools retarded the academic development of an entire generation of students, with potentially irreversible effects. Post-vaccination side effects are becoming ever more apparent.

John Porta

Westhampton