A sampling of recent editorials from Colorado newspapers:
NATIONAL:
Loveland Reporter-Herald, June 27, on the need to review safety risks in the nuclear power industry
When an earthquake and tsunami disabled the safety features of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility in Japan, it brought to the forefront long-held concerns about the safety of nuclear energy.
Nuclear power uses the energy contained inside radioactive elements such as uranium to heat water into steam, which can then be used to turn turbines and create electricity. While the energy comes without the greenhouse gases associated with burning coal or natural gas and can be constant, unlike solar and wind power, it is not cheap. And, as we now know all too well, it does not come without risk.
The Associated Press last week reported on its investigation into the nuclear industry and its level of regulation by the federal government.
Regardless of someone’s personal feelings about nuclear power, the report should cause concern. It showed a trend of nuclear industry officials and regulators being too cozy and losing sight of the bigger picture of public health.
Among the documented concerns are decisions by regulators to change long-held safety parameters to make it easier and much less costly for nuclear power plant operators to achieve them.
The investigation showed that as the nuclear power plants have aged, they have succumbed to many of the wear-and-tear issues common to all equipment, such as corrosion, cracking and leaks. The difference is that the materials being released because of those leaks can have a devastating and long-lasting effect on the environment and on public health.
Already because of the reports, a group of U.S. senators has asked for an investigation into the industry to determine whether Americans might be at greater risk.
Such an inquiry is not only good policy, but it also is a necessary safeguard for an American public who might have a false hope about the safety of the industry.
As events in Japan have shown, we might be only one event away from a much larger catastrophe.
Editorial:
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The Denver Post, June 27, on the need to take a closer look at Pakistan:
Much of the nation was naturally focused on President Obama last week as he announced his drawdown schedule for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
But the experts on the region were actually looking elsewhere—at Afghanistan’s neighbor, the unstable, nuclear-armed Pakistan, which has become an increasingly unfriendly and unreliable American ally.
Even after the 33,000-troop reduction in Afghanistan, there will still be 68,000 troops there. The question we have is why so many troops are still necessary.
There’s an irony of a kind in discussing how much longer it will take to end the long, long war in Afghanistan. The al-Qaeda threat there has greatly diminished. And the present incarnation of the Afghan Taliban— for better or worse, and mostly worse—presents a regional problem more than a direct threat to the United States and our allies.
In a briefing to reporters before Obama’s speech, a senior administration official said, “We don’t see a transnational threat coming out of Afghanistan.” The threat, he said, “has come from Pakistan.”
It is no coincidence that Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan or that he had possible connections to some in the intelligence community there. It’s also no coincidence that most high-level al-Qaeda targets are based in Pakistan.
In a hearing last week of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chairman John Kerry said Afghanistan is a “sideshow to the main event . . . next door.” We’re spending $113 billion on the Afghan sideshow this year and $2.8 billion on Pakistan. Even with the drawdown, we’re set to spend $106 billion in Afghanistan next year.
If Pakistan is the main event, though, it doesn’t make it any easier to figure out what to do there. Pakistan has, of course, been an important ally in fighting terrorists since 9/11, even as the Pakistani frontier next to Afghanistan has become the major source of Taliban supplies.
Pakistani military officials, meanwhile, complain they have lost 3,500 security personnel in fighting Islamic militants, but what they mostly hear from U.S. officials is that they’re not doing enough.
In the aftermath of the Navy SEALs attack in Abbottabad, the relationship has grown even rockier. In fact, a Pew Research Poll found that 69 percent of Pakistanis see America as “more of an enemy” than a friend.
According to reports, Pakistan may no longer allow American drones to be launched against al-Qaeda from what is widely believed to be a secret base within Pakistan. This would be a serious setback, and the best replacement for that base would apparently be in Afghanistan.
That’s why you can expect Americans will leave a significant force in Afghanistan—perhaps as many as 25,000 troops—even after 2014, at which point Barack Obama says most American combat troops should have left the country.
It’s difficult to apply any direct lessons from Afghanistan to Pakistan, which isn’t even the most dangerous problem in a region that also includes Iran. With the fighting in Libya and unrest throughout the area, it’s hard to predict with anything like certainty what the region will look like even a year from now.
But what is increasingly difficult for the Obama administration to explain is why the Afghan sideshow remains the U.S. military’s main event.
Editorial:
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STATE:
The Coloradoan, June 26, on new state medical marijuana regulations:
New state regulations on medical marijuana that take effect Friday are welcome and overdue.
Although Colorado voters passed a constitutional amendment allowing for medical marijuana more than a decade ago, it’s only been in the past few years that grow operations and retail dispensaries or centers have exploded across the state. The lack of state regulation was responsible, in part, for that explosion.
The lack of regulation also has allowed some sketchy players to enter into the medical marijuana business, as their more reputable counterparts readily concede.
The new state regulations should help eliminate some of the chaos.
“Although this might be the most highly regulated and watched industry in this state, I believe it is for the safety of our customers and our businesses to have these things in place,” said Steve Ackerman, a longtime Fort Collins business owner who owns Organic Alternatives and is president of the Northern Colorado Medical Marijuana Council. “I agree with it.”
Under the new regulations, medical marijuana retail and grow operators will have to install expensive video monitoring equipment that can be remotely monitored by regulators around the clock.
Employees will have to pass an FBI background check. And the movement of the product will be tracked from “seed to sale.”
Colorado voters have expressed their will in allowing the use of marijuana for legitimate medical purposes. But there is well-founded concern about abuses of that compassionate decision. These new state regulations will address that concern.
Editorial:
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The Daily Sentinel, June 27, on the new medical marijuana regulations:
What a difference two years make.
In the summer of 2009, medical marijuana dispensaries were sprouting like weeds throughout the state, buoyed by a state court case and new federal interpretation of medical marijuana enforcement. Those dispensaries operated unfettered by any local regulations and only modest state rules that were established by a decade-old constitutional amendment and interpreted in a variety of ways by different authorities.
But this is the summer of 2011, and voters in Mesa County, Grand Junction and a host of communities throughout Colorado have banned medical marijuana dispensaries from within their boundaries. The fate of the only dispensary still in this valley—in Palisade—could be decided by voters in that town later this year.
For the dispensaries that remain in Colorado—and for the caregivers who still can provide medical marijuana, even in communities where dispensaries have been banned—new state regulations take effect July 1 that will change substantially the way they operate.
Some dispensary owners and caregivers say the new rules are so heavy handed that they just may drop out of the business.
Pardon us for not being overly sympathetic to their lament, but the new state regulations are hardly onerous or unreasonable.
Among other things, they require background checks for everyone working in the medical marijuana business to screen out felons and use video surveillance of pot growing and selling operations to keep the drug from being sold on the black market. In addition, caregivers, who can serve up to five patients and don’t have retail outlets, will have new registration requirements that include mandates that they list what they are growing and for whom.
One Front Range dispensary owner said she planned to close her shops, according to an Associated Press story in The Daily Sentinel Monday. She referred to the new rules as “Big Brother tracking.”
But those rules are the direct result of the situation that developed in 2009—the Wild West atmosphere that prevailed, when there were almost no clear rules and anyone with a predilection for pot could open a dispensary and a growing operation.
Many Coloradans grew understandably skeptical whether all that retailing was truly serving only those with real ailments that marijuana could alleviate.
Furthermore, it’s become abundantly clear—through votes on dispensary bans throughout the state—that most Coloradans who voted for a medical marijuana amendment in 2000 didn’t foresee or approve of creating a massive marijuana retail industry in the state.
Under that 2000 amendment, Coloradans have a right to use medical marijuana if their physicians say it could help alleviate their medical symptoms. But the state has an equal right to regulate medical marijuana to ensure that operations related to it are safe and that the pot doesn’t end up in the wrong hands.
That’s exactly what the rules that take effect Friday aim to do.
Editorial:
