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Utility watchdog should
be promoting solar
Re: “Solar expected to help prevent California blackouts” (Page C8, Dec. 16).
“Solar expected to help prevent California blackouts” has been predicted for some time. The grid benefits in several ways from the new locally based supply. Reduced demand for imports results in less reliance on transmission and a more stable grid.
With this information, it is time for the CPUC to monetize rooftop solar power with rate benefits and incentives for all ratepayers. To even more widely disperse this green technology, reducing our carbon footprint, incentives to include low-income households are needed.
Rita Norton
Los Gatos
CPUC must be
held accountable
Re: “Elias: California utility bills to rise for decades after PUC’s solar move” (Dec. 12).
In his online column on Dec. 12, Thomas Elias tells us why PG&E and other California electric utilities urged the CPUC to reduce payments to homeowners for the rooftop solar electricity they send to the grid. The lower payments disincentivize homeowners from putting panels on their roofs. Mr. Elias says what the CPUC has ordered “has already cut installations of rooftop solar substantially.”
No doubt PG&E and other California utilities are struggling with the extra costs to prevent wildfires and adjust to other effects of climate change.
But it’s also true that the investor-owned utilities have an obligation to transition from fossil fuels to renewables as fast as possible. One of the best ways to do this is to get as much electricity as possible from rooftop solar. In short, the CPUC must be more accountable to ratepayers and to the public at large for reducing carbon emissions.
Rob Hogue
Menlo Park
High court should leave
Trump ruling to states
Re: “Trump ruling that disqualifies Trump not likely to hold up” (Page A7, Dec. 26).
The article gave two reasons for the Supreme Court to base a decision. I feel a third was left out.
The court could use the same logic as Roe v. Wade that this is a state issue and uphold the state Supreme Court decisions, whatever they turn out to be.
This to me is the correct path to avoid a political attachment one way or the other.
Walter Hlavacek
San Jose
Court can’t be trusted
to follow Constitution
Re: “Trump ruling that disqualifies Trump not likely to hold up” (Page A7, Dec. 26).
The Supreme Court political hacks masquerading as “justices” have already demonstrated their willingness to steal elections in Gore v. Bush, deliberately misread the Second Amendment in Bruen, and ignore 50 years of precedent supporting women’s health care choices in Dobbs — meanwhile unethically accepting unreported lavish gifts from right-wing billionaires.
The 14th Amendment is clear and unequivocal: “No person … previously taken an oath … who has engaged in insurrection … shall hold any office.” We all saw Trump exhort an insurrectionist mob to “march on the Capitol and fight.” The House committee uncovered a further mountain of evidence that Trump engaged in and promoted an insurrection — for which Trump was impeached and then indicted in federal court and is awaiting trial.
If the ethically challenged MAGA justices on the Supreme Court cannot comprehend what Section 3 of the 14th Amendment clearly mandates, the court needs a major ethical overhaul and ideological expansion ASAP.
Dave Whitaker
San Jose
Choices are stark
in 2024 election
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It looks like voters in the next, and maybe final, U.S. presidential election will have two very different choices: boring old democracy or exciting new autocracy.
I hope that voters read a little history, look at recent world events, and try to see the broad consequences beyond their own narrow, near-term self-interests.
Most voters know a lot about the first choice. For the second choice, we can learn a lot from current autocracies and dictatorships in other former Western democracies and see, in his own words, what Candidate 2 plans to do to ours.
Barry Bronson
Saratoga
