Letters to the Editor

We have a voice

Editor:

Stop worrying about national polls in races for national politician. Why?

The United States has never held a national popular election.

On anything. Ever.

Nowhere does the Constitution have “we the people” vote as “the people” in one single, national poll. The House of Representatives? We vote by districts drawn in state lines. Senate? We vote by state. Supreme Court? We don’t vote at all.

But wait, what about president and vice president? Each state gets as many electors as they have representatives and senators in Congress, and the state Legislature decides how those electors are chosen. Each state has an election to determine its electors, but this means we don’t really have a national election for president.

New Mexico has an election for president. Texas has an election for president. We don’t pick their electors and they don’t pick ours. The electoral college puts the results of the states’ elections for president together to come up with a president of the United States.

Even the Constitution was not adopted in a truly national vote. Though, as scholar Akhil Amar reminds us, more people voted on the United States Constitution than had ever voted on anything before, the Constitution was adopted by votes within the states.

This means that when we go to vote for our national politicians this year, we are not just voting as Americans. We are voting as New Mexicans. New Mexico has a voice. We have a voice. Let’s take some pride in standing for our state.

Jonathan Gardner

Los Lunas

Letter writer mistaken

Editor:

A recent letter to the News-Bulletin presented a vague conspiracy theory about the “Net-Zero agenda” of taking away everyone’s energy, which Democratic politicians want to inflict on everyone. (The letter writer actually used the rather childish “Democrat politicians,” a goofy term favored by “Republic politicians.”)

I suppose it’s one way to describe Democratic efforts to keep the planet habitable for oxygen-breathing organisms like the letter writer and the rest of us.

The letter writer quotes a guy named Alex Epstein for most of her argument. Epstein is a bright fellow who grasped the money-making potential of opposing renewable energy early on, and he has made it onto several lists of top global warming deniers. He runs the Center for Industrial Progress, a for-profit think tank that encourages more and more fossil fuel use, and he consults for coal and petroleum corporations. The British newspaper, The Guardian, characterized his work as “very influential on the right because it is a particularly fluent, elaborate form of climate denialism.”

The letter writer states that over 6,000 products are made from fossil fuels and lists quite a few of them, along with the claim that renewable energy can’t make any of them, and that “One 42 gallon (sic) of oil creates 19.4 gallons of gasoline and the rest, over half, is used to make things like plastic.” She ends with the claim that “oil and gas produce everything!”

The U.S. Energy Information Administration says that from one 42-gallon barrel of oil, 19 to 20 gallons are refined into motor gasoline and 11 to 12 more gallons become heating oil, jet fuel, and diesel fuel. That is, 74 percent of the oil is burned to supply energy, leaving only 26 percent for all those other wonderful things. So I actually agree with her about the wider usefulness of petroleum, which makes burning it seems incredibly short-sighted, particularly when solar and wind supply free fuel forever.

Laura Sanchez

Los Lunas