Here are some readers' comments on the Inquirer's recent series "Smoke and Mirrors: The Subversion of the EPA," on the Bush administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Gino Segre
Professor of physics
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia
Your well-documented, albeit depressing, series showed how the Bush administration systematically disregarded the recommendations of authoritative scientific studies.
If science continues to be politicized, we are on a destructive path regarding the health and well-being of future generations as well as our own. I have high hopes that the Obama administration will take a very different tack.
Ed Richman
Blue Bell
When are you going to give up on the global-warming hoax? Sorry, now that the earth is cooling again, it's conveniently called climate change. Look at the temperature patterns. The earth has been warming and cooling in 30-year cycles, and we appear to be about 10 years into another cooling cycle. So even though atmospheric carbon dioxide has been steadily increasing, temperatures only increase every 30 years.
Perhaps declaring CO2 a pollutant and regulating farm animals, bakeries and soda machines is not a great idea after all.
Rev. Kent R. Pipes
President
The Affordable Homes Group
Mount Holly
Your series provoked anger within me on many fronts. As a dedicated evangelical Christian, I must adopt a seamless link between my pro-life belief and everything I do, which includes caring for the homeless, the hungry, the infirm, the unborn - in short, all of those who are in need.
The same care for the Earth must be manifested in our actions since we are all but sojourners, not permanent residents, and as such, we owe it to future generations to leave a place that is clean and healthy.
I am ashamed of EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson for calling himself an evangelical Christian and then acting counter to all of the fundamental principles of our faith.
Stephen P. Kunz
Senior ecologist
Schmid & Co. Inc.
Media
» READ MORE: spkunz@aol.com
Kudos for an informative and evocative series on EPA shortcomings with respect to global warming and the Clean Air Act.
As a consulting ecologist, I know you could easily fill another four-part series on EPA's flagrant lack of enforcement of wetland and water-quality regulations and its disregard of Clean Water Act protections.
Jeffrey Erlbaum
Lafayette Hill
After reading your series on the EPA's mission during the Bush years, I've been trying to find something positive to come out of the Bush years. Then I remembered that, under Bush, Daylight Savings Time was extended, allowing kids across the country to have more daylight to trick-or-treat on Halloween.
Of course, they may need gas masks under their costumes, but hey, if that's the price to pay . . .