- Tariffs In Reality
- Solar Power ‘Cost Shift’
- Think Long-Term
- Alcatraz? Really?
- Don’t Forget Gaza
- Greenland’s Sand
- Save Alex Thomas Plaza
- The War On Science
TARIFFS IN REALITY
Editor:
I went into a hardware chain store to purchase a mesh bathtub strainer, marked $4.59 on the shelf. The cashier scanned the barcode: $6.59. He explained that the chain had updated the barcode price before he could change the shelf price and that the increase was due to tariffs. The item was made in Taiwan. He also remarked that he was disappointed — the chain has two years’ worth of stock and didn’t need to raise the price at this time.
What I understand from this sad story is that American retailers may see tariffs as an opportunity to gouge consumers. And consumers will be suckered into paying in advance for an ill-advised and unpopular trade war that has little chance of encouraging the remaining American factories to make these everyday items.
My story has two morals. First, beware of price gougers and stand up for your rights. Because I spoke up, I ended up paying $5.05 ($4.59 plus tax) for the item that had rung up as $7.25 ($6.59 plus tax). And second, think before you vote. Understand what is being promised, and how it may affect you. It’s too late this time around, but as far as I know there will be another election in four years.
Christine Thomas-Melly
Santa Rosa
SOLAR POWER ‘COST SHIFT’
Editor:
There is chaos raining down on us from the current federal administration, but we can’t forget the greatest challenge of our time — the increasing threat of climate change. As Pope Francis wrote in Laudate Deum, “The world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.”
California’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2045 calls for a 100% clean energy grid. To reach that goal we need all the solar and other clean energy we can muster. It is said that rooftop solar is making electric rates higher due to “cost shift” (“Balancing the costs and benefits of rooftop solar,” Close to Home, April 17) — but there are other cost shifts.
For example, homes with underground distribution lines, and less-dense rural homes, pay the same rates as everyone else even though installation costs are higher for them. The most insidious cost shift is to the communities that bear the burden of pollution from electric power plants. Don’t let our rooftop solar industry be destroyed. Contact your elected California representatives and the California Public Utilities Commission (cpuc.ca.gov) and let them know how you feel about solar.
Kathryn Albury
Forestville
THINK LONG-TERM
Editor:
After years of study and a multitude of efforts to resuscitate the Potter Valley Project, it is time for us to focus on implementing long-term solutions rather than trying to change the inevitable. As climate change continues to negatively impact our region’s water resources, we must take measures to improve our self-resiliency and prepare for times of shortage.
To prepare for drought, it’s crucial to start implementing solutions now. While building a more reliable wet-season diversion from the Eel River is a priority, our watershed must be able to put that to the most beneficial use. This means that we must actively work toward an array of measures that help increase groundwater recharge, recycled water and on-site storage options, while also reducing overall demands on the Russian River Watershed and increasing existing reservoir storage. Increasing real-time transparency and accountability of water use will also be key.
No matter what solutions are ultimately implemented, the crucial thing is that we begin implementing forward-looking solutions today instead of clinging to the past. This is a problem that we can solve together to ensure our community and the river have enough water.
Jaime Neary, Staff Attorney
Policy director and staff attorney, Russian Riverkeeper
Healdsburg
ALCATRAZ? REALLY?
Editor:
Just when you thought you’ve heard it all, along comes yet another insane comment from the unstable genius in the White House. Let’s turn Alcatraz back into a prison to house the nation’s worst criminals.
Really? I can’t even start to imagine the time, cost and public pushback that would follow. How about we turn Mar-a-Lago into a prison. It’s surrounded by tons of security and is already housing a convicted felon and the most dangerous man since World War II.
Lou Gouveia
Sebastopol
DON’T FORGET GAZA
Editor:
Many of us are focused, rightly, on the destruction that Donald Trump is wreaking on American institutions, laws and values. But I fervently ask you not to turn away from what continues to happen in Israel and Gaza.
In Gaza, airstrikes, drones and ground operations continue daily. No food, water or medicine has entered Gaza for two months. Already one of the most densely populated areas in the world, Gazans have now been herded into just 30% of Gaza’s land.
In the West Bank, air strikes and bulldozers have demolished infrastructure and housing for 20,000 residents in the major cities of Jenin and Nablus. Over 900 people have been killed since Oct 7. Settlers protected or aided by the Israeli army or police have ravaged small Palestinian villages.
B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, reports that beatings, torture and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners are occurring in Israeli prisons in amounts far greater than ever before.
But dare you in this country voice any objection or peacefully demonstrate on campus against this injustice. You can lose your student visa or be doxxed by organizations alerting potential employers to your “antisemitism.” Interesting and paradoxically, many of the protesters are Jewish faculty and students standing up for the basic Jewish value of justice.
Joan Meisel
Cloverdale
GREENLAND’S SAND
Editor,
Donald Trump’s “deep attachment to symbols of power and identity” (as described by James Meek in a recent London Review of Books article) is probably sufficient to explain his interest in Greenland As Meeks notes, two other common rationalizations — securing the Arctic frontier against Russia in a world with less or no northern sea ice, and the exploitation of rare earth elements — fall on the grounds that these things are impracticable and unnecessary. However, Greenland does stand in a unique position with regard to another increasingly valuable resource: sand.
The rapid urban expansion of the 20th century necessitated the mining of vast quantities of sand and gravel, the primary constituents of concrete. By a wide margin, sand and gravel are extracted in greater amounts than any other material (nearly thirty gigatons per year by 2010, presumably a vast underestimate considering the power of illegal sand-mining operations). Nonetheless, the global sand supply system is bracing for hard times. A global sand shortage is widely seen as inevitable, and may have arrived already. One issue is that not all sand works as aggregate for concrete. An individual grain in the Sahara has probably spent a million years experiencing mechanical abrasion, getting rounded and polished as it blows in the wind and slams into its neighbors, but for concrete the grains need to be rough and angular if they are to pack together effectvely. Riverbeds are full of suitable sand.
A documentary from 2022, ‘Eat Bitter,’ follows a sand supply chain in the Central African Republic, from the backbreaking work of an artisanal diver filling buckets by hand n the Ubangi River to a Chinese construction foreman building a bank in the capital, Bangui. Many of these localized reserves, near the construction projects they’re intended for, are already exhausted. Others have been mined to the point of destroying ecosystems and destabilizing riverbanks, threatening riparian communities.
Another ideal source of angular grains is from the bed of melting glaciers. As the Greenland ice sheet retreats, it grinds down the underlying bedrock and liberates fine-grained sediments. These are carried by river channels to the coast, forming deltas. Mining these deltas would probably involve the use of floating suction dredgers to pipe sand from the delta directly into larger tankers. This obviates the need for a skilled local labor force and carries less long-term risk than developing a mine; you can simply pull anchor and sail away.
Trump himself is more interested in turning “the world’s largest island” red, white and blue on the map than in any of these considerations. But that isn’t necessarily true of some of the people around him.
For example, his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, was the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald when the firm acquired a $10 million stake in the Critical Metals Corporation, which is actively pursuing a rare-earth mine in southern Greenland. (He stepped down after he was confirmed by the Senate.) One wonders if the smart money might shift from the extraction of materials that would go into solar panels, turbines and EVs to the mining of materials to build gaudy skyscrapers and luxury condos. An enormous ship anchored far offshore, hauling away the island itself as it is ground to gravel under the melting ice sheet, all to build the Trump Hotel Rafah: it feels almost inevitable.
Greenland’s mineral deposits on the east coast were first discovered in 1964 by a British expedition of which I was a member. The mineralized veins occur in Tertiary basaltic rocks near the snout of the Kronborg glacier. Aircraft routinely patrolled the coast checking for other country’s submarines. Our expedition found grim evidence of this in the wreck and dead crew of one such aircraft that perhaps through navigational error was flying inland at night and crashed into the basalt cliffs on the north side of the glacier.
David Bell
Oxford, England
SAVE ALEX THOMAS PLAZA
To: Shannon Riley, Deputy City Manager
City of Ukiah Civic Center
300 Seminary Avenue
Ukiah, CA 95482
Dear Ms. Riley,
I’m writing to express my concern about a statement you recently made to a journalist that if Mendocino County deeds the soon-to-be-vacant courthouse property to the City of Ukiah, the City considers the sale and demoliton of Alex Thomas Plaza to be a “serious possibility.” This comment appeared on April 27 in a news story published in three prominent local media outlets (here, here and here).
I started a petition to oppose this “serious possibility,” which just surpassed 100 supporters.
This idea came as a shock to me and I’m guessing most who value Alex Thomas Plaza and wish to see it maintained and preserved, not demolished.
I am hoping you will respond to the following questions to provide the public with information about the City’s contemplation of a plan you revealed to sell our town square in order to pay for demolition of the courthouse:
1) When you announced on 4/27/25 that the sale of Alex Thomas Plaza is “a serious possibility,” can you explain what you meant? What does the modifier “serious” indicate?
2) You didn’t say the sale and demolition of the plaza was one possibility being explored among others and follow that statement with other possibilities … Why? Why did you only mention one possibility?
3) Were you expressing your personal opinion, or speaking on behalf of the City of Ukiah?
4) If you were speaking on behalf of the City, can you explain how this proposal advanced to the current stage, which you are calling “serious”? How did the question of the future of the soon-to-be-empty courthouse become connected with Alex Thomas Plaza, a property which has absolutely nothing to do with the courthouse? From whose imagination did this idea originate?
5) If Mendocino County deeds the courthouse to the City of Ukiah, do you support the sale of Alex Thomas Plaza to fund the demolition of the courthouse and construction of a new plaza at that site?
6) Are you aware of any other proposals or plans for use of the courthouse or other proposals to fund the demolition of the courthouse? Do you know why no other proposals have been mentioned, much less described as “serious,” by city staff?
7) Why, of all the property that the City of Ukiah owns, did you select Alex Thomas Plaza as a “serious possibility” for sale and demolition? Why are other city properties, of which there are many, not being given “serious” consideration for sale and redevelopment?
Thank you for taking the time to consider these questions. I look forward to your reply.
Sincerely,
Andrew Lutsky
Ukiah
THE WAR ON SCIENCE
Editor:
Every day we learn about another scientific, health and safety program canceled or a group of scientists or health professionals being fired from various federal agencies. The potential loss of institutional knowledge possessed by these groups and individuals will only be known when our citizens die because of neglect by the various agencies that provide health and human services, occupational and health safety, environmental protection and much more. For example, to pursue increased use of coal for power, miners will no longer be screened for black lung disease.
The agencies are being led by individuals with no experience in the areas they are leading. Our citizens need to express outrage at this war on science forged by the administration. This is all happening with no oversight by Congress, which holds the purse strings for funding these programs but sits on its hands hoping no one notices so it can pass a budget to give tax breaks to billionaires.
Don Raimondi
Santa Rosa
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