$100 for gas relief is an idea that tanks
Re “GOP Offers Consumer Fuel-Relief Package,” April 28
Memo to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), the rest of Congress and President Bush: Keep the $100 you’re planning to give me to “ease the pain” of buying my next two tankfuls of gas.
Spend the money instead on developing sustainable energy sources such as solar, geothermal, ocean thermal electrical conversion, shale oil and maybe even nuclear fusion.
And while you’re at it, take the billions of dollars and tremendous technical expertise being expended to send humans to Mars and use it instead to push these energy development efforts, Manhattan Project-style, to levels that might actually lead to some real breakthroughs.
But don’t insult my intelligence by offering me 100 bucks in exchange for an agreement to plunder the Arctic wilderness for a couple of years’ worth of $4-per-gallon gasoline.
JON ROWE
Costa Mesa
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Anyone holding a gas credit card should cut it up and send it back to the issuing company. We don’t need to pay the oil companies high interest on their cards in addition to feeding their corporate greed at the pumps.
Further, why does Congress call for an investigation into high gas prices when we already know (every time the quarterly profit statements come out) that we’re being taken yet again?
Let Congress and every elected official pay for their own transportation costs; then maybe they’ll know what we’ve known all along.
KAREN WEAVER
Anaheim
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Re “Oil and politics don’t mix,” editorial, April 28
Your suggestion that high prices are good because they will force alternative sources of energy didn’t work when Jimmy Carter proposed it in 1980, and it won’t work now, especially in the short term.
With the oil companies, especially Exxon Mobil, making obscene profits and giving one retiring CEO a ludicrous bonus, the solution to the oil crisis is not the stupid $100 rebate out of tax money to the public, or even some excess profit tax, which would never pass as long as the Republicans are in charge, but a boycott of all Exxon Mobil gas stations. This has already started in some parts of the country.
A month or two of no one buying Exxon Mobil gas would force it to see the handwriting on the wall and substantially reduce prices, even if it has to dip into its profits. The rest of the companies would fall in line.
LAWRENCE R. BOOTH
Santa Monica
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I pay an exorbitant price at the pump; Exxon Mobil makes an exorbitant profit. I pay a reasonable price at the pump; Exxon Mobil makes a reasonable profit.
What’s so complicated about that?
MITCHELL TENDLER
San Diego
