Forum, Jan. 2: No such thing as green energy

Stop lying to the kids, guys. There is no Electricity Fairy. She ain’t real. Green energy doesn’t exist.

What is real? Genocide, slave and indentured labor, children losing their childhoods in rare-earth mining operations, the poor freezing so the rich can money-launder via tax subsidies to impress their friends with their new Teslas and solar-panel roofs.

You know that bizarrely reviled phrase “Do your own research”? Throwing down my gauntlet: Prove me wrong. Tell me Scotland didn’t cut down 14 million trees to make room for wind turbines. (And educate me on how wind farms — land-based or off-shore — aren’t ravaging bird and marine habitats.) Show me how solar panel manufacture isn’t destroying human and natural environments. Demonstrate how nickel mining for electric cars isn’t threatening pristine rainforests. And ask me why I won’t be surprised if the fire that just incinerated Sillycow Farms’ factory turns out to be related to the charging station for an electric forklift (“Hot chocolate factory burns,” Dec. 23). Firefighters nationwide have been warning about the challenges in putting out electric-engine-related blazes. In my view, the safety technology hasn’t quite caught up with the politically correct frenzy.

Those who can afford to show off their social consciousness apparently aren’t troubled by denying others the means of affordably warming their homes in our beautiful but wretched winters. Why is that? Please educate me.

SARAH CRYSL AKHTAR

Lebanon

Need a New Year’s resolution? Here’s an ambitious one: Do what you can to save democracy. You’ll have an opportunity to act on it this week. Without your pressure, New Hampshire Republican legislators will vote in lockstep to pass the heavily gerrymandered voting maps for our state.

To tip the scales for the U.S. House districts, Republicans moved 75 election precincts (365,000 voters). For the New Hampshire House districts, they denied 55 eligible towns the right to their own representative, as promised by Article 11 of the New Hampshire Constitution. We have yet to see the new Executive Council districts, but they were already significantly gerrymandered by Republicans in 2011, rendering a 4-1 Republican advantage and several divisive partisan decisions.

Need more motivation? New Hampshire is one of many Republican-controlled state legislatures to propose voter suppression laws, “justified” by persistent Republican lies about voter fraud. A Republican-nominated majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Guardian has identified 202 bills proposed in 41 states with the intent to hijack the election process. Republicans in Congress have stonewalled two voting rights bills, which would address these threats to democracy.

On the day before the Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump strategist Steve Bannon said, “Just understand this: All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. ... It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow.”

Will democracy hold? Read Barton Gellman’s article “January 6 Was Practice” in The Atlantic.

ALLAN MacDONALD

New London

I implore the city of Lebanon not to miss this opportunity (“Village Market to be developed,” Dec. 29). The addition of more housing units to the area is definitely needed, and it looks like this use would fit the property well. I did not, however, see anything in the article from Execusuite, Studio Nexus or from Lebanon Planning Board members regarding net-zero construction of the proposed buildings. This is the phase when this should be discussed!

If the Upper Valley is to move forward with its goals of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, now is the time to actually double down and make this happen.

GARY L. HUTCHINS

Enfield

I want to commend my neighbor, an older gentleman, for his dogged pursuit of bringing home — dead — a deer this past hunting season. He is truly a gentle man. It is not the carnage that pulls him into the wild. It is the meat he envisions laying away in a newly donated food freezer.

Vermont law regulating this activity (the killing, and the management of an otherwise overpopulated deer herd) divides the spoils by idiosyncratic licensure of a variety of weapons: the crossbow, the muzzleloader, and the much more powerful rifle. The state authorizes each of these weapons in various periods, restricting the killing by defined datelines. The full hunting period spans three months, which ended recently. My neighbor owns weapons that suit each period.

He has traversed the hunting grounds every day of the season, without fail. Yet, for all the fields in which he has walked, the deer often visible in farmland and along roadsides have not presented at just the right moment, at just the right angle, in just the right light, to augur the kill. There was one sighting where my neighbor got off a shot and a hit was made — in a doe. But the arrow struck her shoulder and she raced off with the rest of the herd, the arrow hers to keep.

My neighbor is perplexed: There is little blood; the animal did not stagger. My neighbor attempted to trail her, but she left no sign.

Hunting permits have all lapsed now, and wouldn’t you know, just yesterday a very slight deer arrives and chews at the cut-off stocks of autumn’s flowers. And another day, as my neighbor visited the refuse containers, three full-size doe arrive, and they all stand frozen. “Boo,” my neighbor finally says. Just “boo.”

At home, my neighbor takes from his closet a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, his resource for the next nine months. My neighbor — did I not say? — is a gentle man.

MARY FOWLER

Norwich