To the Editor:

I have two questions for Will Siegfried (Jan. 31, 2023 letter titled Opinion: It’s time to ditch your gas stove, says Potsdam resident) and the rest of the environmental extremists who think we should abandon gas stoves and invest our hard-earned money in other costly “improvements” to save us from ourselves:

Question #1: What data can you provide that any of the extreme measures you all have been promoting are slowing or stopping the naturally-occurring warming of our planet?

Question #2: What’s your next target crisis?

In the 1970s, we had to abandon paper shopping bags for plastic because we were killing too many trees.

Fast forward 40 years and we see a photo of some form of wildlife with a plastic bag wrapped around part of its body, so now we are forced to abandon those evil plastic bags in favor of paper. Oh yeah, and to add insult to injury, the money-grubbers in Albany pass a law that allows multi-billion-dollar corporations to charge us five cents for every bag we dare to use.

Now, we send those costly paper bags to our local recycling center only to find out that we are actually recycling a mere fraction of the materials we so dutifully rinse and place in our recycling bins.

The rest is landfilled. (Google John Stossel’s very enlightening video on recycling.)

Seems the enviro-crazy, phony recyclers have been lying about this little troublesome fact for decades.

Americans are also blamed for the huge “island of discarded plastic” that roams the oceans but facts tell us almost all of that garbage has been dumped there by China, India and countries in Africa.

Prior to the gas stove and shopping bag hysteria, a photographer snapped a picture of a tortoise with a plastic drinking straw stuck in its nose. Thus, an all-out war was declared against plastic straws by the media and the enviro-Nazis.

Around the same time, the crazies decided that Styrofoam takeout food boxes were destroying the planet. Pandering politicians like disgraced serial molester Andrew Cuomo and other Democrats banned them and now our food is delivered in soggy cardboard boxes that collapse if they are stacked on top of each other. Our $40 or $50 meal in delivered as a mushy heap in our PAPER bag. Just hope the bottom doesn’t drop out on the way to the table.

What else?

Oh, that’s right! We put too much salt on the roads. Better to leave them icy so grandma gets killed in a crash on her way to bingo.

Manufacturing has been killing us for decades, we’ve been told, so the EPA, DEC and other nutjobs drove those industries out of NY and USA to places like China and Mexico with ridiculously burdensome regulations. They pollute even more there, by the way.

So give up your gas stove, replace all of your perfectly fine cookware and spend 500 bucks on a convection cooktop. Then we’ll all be safe and the earth will start cooling, right Mr. Siefried?

Baloney!

When you get the billions of people in China, India and Africa to stop cooking on dirty, unscrubbed, truly polluting coal fires, let us know. When other countries cut back even a fraction of the emissions from their businesses and residences, let us know. Also, give us a heads-up when other countries stop harvesting endangered wild animals, whales and fish, will ya?

Until the majority of the world’s inhabitants start following a small portion of the same restrictive, monolithic environmental laws we Americans endure every day, back off on the gas stoves, plastic shopping bags, straws and Styrofoam.

Stop the enviro-hysteria, please.

Joseph D. Gray
Massena