Letters: Wind farm, infrastructure spending and photo privacy | April 1

Richland man likes wind project

I have lived in Richland for 18 years. I support the Horse Heaven renewable energy project. Washington continues to grow, and we are not building new hydroelectric dams or nuclear plants. If we do not build new renewable energy projects either, growing electricity demand in Washington will be supplied by burning more natural gas.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that Washington got 15% of its electricity from natural gas in 2019. That’s more than double when I moved here in 2003. Like the Columbia Generating Station, new renewable electricity projects in Benton County will bolster Washington’s electricity supply without consuming fossil fuels or discharging combustion products into the air.

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We need to pay for infrastructure

“We’re leaving our kids with a crushing burden of debt.” Bullfeathers!

By fussing about government spending, we’re leaving our grandkids and their kids with an even more onerous burden: The crumbling and outdated infrastructure that our parents and their parents willingly took on the burden to build.

Epic wildfires in California were reportedly started because an electric utility failed to upgrade its transmission system. And underfunded regulators failed to force the issue. Texas freezes in the dark because its electrical grid is largely isolated from the rest of the country when the ‘big freeze’ hits.

When was the last time you paced a passenger train at 60 or 70 miles per hour? That’s less than half the routine operating speed of the French TGV or the Japanese bullet trains. Or the Shanghai Maglev that reaches 267 mph in commercial service.

And I haven’t even mentioned the sorry state of our bridges, highways and dams.

We should spend big on improving infrastructure and R&D, thus creating good living-wage jobs. The increased tax revenue will offset much of the initial spend. And it will go a long way toward cutting rates of poverty and homelessness that plague us now.

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Scraping photos invades privacy

I bet you think your face belongs to you. To be more precise, your faceprint. But it does not, according to an article in the New York Times.

All those pictures you posted on Facebook? Collected by a company called Clearview.ai and used to identify you wherever you go. If your faceprint is on the internet, Clearview.ai can “scrape” it and store it in their database. Artificial intelligence assures law enforcement and whoever else pays Clearview.ai that any image of your face is really you and make it easy to find you. Washington state has no laws stating that your faceprint belongs to you and neither does the federal government.

The Chinese government is using AI to make facial recognition of every Chinese citizen (and who knows what others) easy. What a great tool for authoritarian governments to suppress legitimate dissent. Only a matter of time before the Trump (nee Republican) Party uses it to suppress voting rights to identify anyone and everyone they would like to claim voted illegally.

This is the world our children and grandchildren will know and they will need an old outdated dictionary to look up the word ‘privacy,’ should the subject ever come up.

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Wind farm plan is win, win, win

Horse Heaven Hills Wind Farm: This is a win, win, win project. It creates new jobs for Southeastern Washington while not eliminating any existing jobs, it helps to reduce our electric bills, it will require an upgrade of our electrical distribution systems, it allows dual use of land maintaining agricultural output, it allows America, along with most other countries, to build a more sustainable, cleaner form of energy. Bottom line: more better-paying jobs. Everything else is just a bonus.

This story was originally published April 1, 2021 at 12:01 AM with the headline "Letters: Wind farm, infrastructure spending and photo privacy | April 1."