Laboratory name change spells trouble

Re: “The National Renewable Energy Lab is renamed,” Dec. 3 news story

Changing the name of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to the National Laboratory of the Rockies may seem inconsequential to the casual newsreader, but it’s a true harbinger of this administration’s brutal neutralizing of clean energy technology development in the United States.

It’s hard to know what the “Laboratory of the Rockies” will actually be; maybe something like analyzing professional baseball in Colorado or such. Regardless, the laboratory will soon lose its position as the leading applied science lab in the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratory System for developing marketable, clean energy technologies. This has been done primarily through NREL’s long-term research relationships with American business concerns.

Three more years of slash-and-burn of these relationships will cause irreparable harm to American leadership in this critical 21st-century sector, allowing China dominance for years to come. Bad news for Colorado, bad news for the United States. Very sad.

John A. Herrick, Denver

Editor’s note: Herrick is a former chief counsel for the Department of Energy’s Golden Field Office.

Forty-one years have elapsed since constructed in 1984, but hey, it’s never too late to make a change. “Renewable energy” is no longer permissible under the “climate realism” Orwellian newspeak of the new regime. The buildings remain in place on the southern slope of South Table Mountain in Golden, but the National Renewable Energy Lab is now the National Laboratory of the Rockies. Wonder what they will be doing there?

Phil Nelson, Golden

Putting on chains altogether now

Re: “Law requires anti-slip devices for 2WD vehicles,” Nov. 22 news story

Can CDOT and the state legislature as a whole imagine the drivers of all two-wheel drive vehicles on many miles of Interstate 70 stopping at the same time to install “anti-slip devices” when snows begin? That is what their new law requires. And notably, many miles of the highway now have an express lane, which “disappeared” formerly safe shoulders. Additionally, if you happen to have an all-wheel drive vehicle, note that if you are rolling on the last 59% of your thousand-dollar tire set’s tread in such weather, you will be breaking the law as well.

Thanks, to all of the genius legislators who so badly want to please the ski industry lobby.

Peter Ehrlich, Denver

License plata data as boogeyman is oversold

Re: “Big Brother is tracking you – Denver’s descent into dystopia,” Nov. 30  commentary

Robin Reichhardt’s column oversells and underdelivers by a mile. Renewing an existing license plate contract is clearly not a “descent” into anything, and the details are as mundane as the license plate cameras on our toll lanes and money trees, er, mobile speed cameras. The piece misses a glaring point: The plate data is hard deleted after 30 days. While police can search it later, it’s not much later.

Among other things the author doesn’t like are data centers, which she used her imagination in describing and tying to Big Brother Denver. The internet is complicated, but there’s no causation between the license plate cameras and the CoreSite — or any other local data center. Flock’s data is not stored in Colorado. Even if it were, plate records contribute no meaningful portion to data center capacity, which is almost entirely videos of attractive people doing banal tasks, cat videos, and, of course, porn.

I do appreciate the writer’s description of herself as a “community organizer” rather than an “informed citizen.”

Bradley Rehak, Denver

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