Expense Is Relative

I applaud the overall tenor and recommendations in your Feb. 18 editorial, “A Too-Dirty Clean Air Plan.” Yet I gasped on reading your agreement with President Bush that “compliance with the [Kyoto] treaty would be prohibitively expensive.” Really?

By me, “prohibitively expensive” goes with funding a wartime economy to benefit the military-industrial complex and maintain a high-voter-approval commander in chief image for Bush. By me, “prohibitively expensive” goes with giving whatever it takes for a nonsensical “Star Wars” bullet-hitting-bullet missile program. By me, “prohibitively expensive” does not go with forcing citizens and industry to do the right thing, which is to preserve the planet.

Terry De Wolfe

Monterey Park