I admire this writer for responding to angry nonsense with reason. At the time, my only response was ‘Wow’.
Talk of the town | Albuquerque Journal News
Name-calling is not acceptable rebuttal
LAST WEEK IN SpeakUp! there were two violently anti-environmental submissions. They contained six sentences, one of which was totally false, one was a rhetorical question, and four amounted to name-calling.
The only sentence of substance claimed that “we have millions of miles of pipelines and railroads that carry oil and gasoline without incident.”
On pipelines alone, a Wall Street Journal review found that there were 1,400 pipeline spills and accidents in the U.S. in 2010-2013 – 350 per year, and four of every five pipeline accidents are discovered by local residents, not the companies that own the pipelines.
As far as I can determine, there’s a little over 300,000 miles of major natural gas pipelines, with another 1.8 million miles of lines that come off those and deliver to cities. There are only about 100,000 miles of gathering and distribution pipelines for oil.
Unfortunately, that’s the only sentence of the six that can be fact-checked, because all the rest are name-calling or extremely obvious exaggeration. For example, I consider myself an environmentalist, but I don’t think we should go live in caves, just that we should be a bit more careful with our surroundings.
Another sentence claims environmentalists have used “falsified science and pagan Gaia mysticism.” Wow. Science and mysticism.
If you want to rebut the arguments of environmentalists, you might try:
a) Getting your facts straight, and
b) Actually giving reasons for your views, not resorting to name-calling and nonsensical claims.
JERRY STAUFFER
Albuquerque