To the editor:

Leonard Krishtalka’s “No good environment news” (Journal-World, Jan. 10) is excellent and depicts the serious choices that are in our path today.

Please begin to help make the right choices by opposing the newly sworn-in governor’s approval of new coal plants in Kansas.

Wind power, solar heating systems, geothermal heat pumps, photo-voltaics and other renewable choices are the promise of the future, not coal and not inefficient ethanol production.

In his 1990 essay, “Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere and Biosphere,” physicist Freeman Dyson makes a call to arms to begin to measure oxygen depletion: “The Pacific Ocean as a whole is already seriously depleted. It contains 50 percent of the planet’s water but only about 40 percent of the dissolved oxygen. So long as we are not measuring the rate of depletion year by year we have no basis for guessing how soon the asphyxiation of parts of the ocean might begin.”

Dyson: “The reservoir of oxygen in the atmosphere is large but not infinite. It amounts to 1.2 million gigatons. Since eight tons of oxygen are used up for every three tons of carbon burned, and we are burning six gigatons of carbon per year (1990 before the current China), we might expect that the oxygen is being used up at the rate of about 13 parts per million per year. Thirteen parts per million should be measurable.”

“Whether or not the general public is concerned, there are important scientific reasons for measuring the oxygen.”

Sven Erik Alstrom,

Lawrence