CTA needs to get rid of diesel buses, not add more

I appreciate the Sun-Times story about climate activists urging the Chicago Transit Authority to stop buying more diesel buses, but the article didn’t give details as to why having a fully electric bus fleet is so important.

We face a climate crisis that requires us to cut greenhouse gases drastically to avoid a future many times worse than the unprecedented heat waves, forest fires and floods we are seeing this summer.

Yet the CTA seems to be asleep at the wheel, with plans to buy 500 new diesel buses that will continue spewing greenhouse gases well past 2030. It is hard to see how the CTA can meet its own goal of 100% electric by 2040 at the current pace.

Why must they continue spewing unnecessary greenhouse gases over the next decade? Pace, which ordered 20 electric buses in March, seems more committed toward zero-emissions. Being so much larger, the CTA has more challenges but also would have a much bigger impact. I’m sure if there is a will, there will be a way. Some other cities and countries are way ahead of us.

When I walk around the city, it is disheartening to see all the diesel buses that are making the climate worse. I’m also painfully aware the air here gets a failing grade in smog pollution from the American Lung Association. Not all of that is from diesel exhaust, of course, but it is a contributor. I will breathe easier — literally — if they are removed from the street at a faster clip.

Cynthia Linton, Streeterville

Holocaust analogies are inappropriate. Period.

Please make note Darren Bailey, all politicians, and for that matter, everyone: Just don’t mention Nazis, the Holocaust or Hitler in any analogies or metaphors, or, for that matter, in any context. Nothing good can come from it. Isn’t this in the handbook “How to be an adult?”

Craig Goldwyn, Brookfield

Trumpism is alive and well

Conservative Republican voters may not like Donald Trump as a leader/candidate, but on Tuesday, in elections elsewhere, they revealed themselves as supporters of Trumpism, which means, in effect, they support minority authoritarian rule by their party.

Mary F. Warren, Wheaton