Wake up in Sea Pines before it’s too late

I couldn’t help but draw a comparison between the Goodwin family and the Sea Pines Resort to Amazon’s recent withdrawal from New York’s HQ2 deal, citing that they felt “unwelcome” by the residents. The small but loud minority won and are doing a victory lap. Albeit shy of a few more zeroes, a similar situation is playing out in our backyard and the Sea Pines residents need to wake up and act before it is too late.

The Goodwins are also getting a clear “unwelcome” from a loud minority of residents who call themselves “The Alliance.” When the Goodwins pull out of Sea Pines to invest their money in another location where they feel supported by residents, will the Alliance members in Sea Pines run a victory lap or will they be stunned and regretful? The Goodwins have options for their millions of investment dollars and the Sea Pines Resort must be looking more unattractive by the minute. I’m sure they never could’ve anticipated that all their time and over $100 million put into upgrades would be met with such hostility.

The implications are tremendous. Has the Alliance thought about the potential outcomes or do they not even envision that something like this could happen? How many of them remember what things were like before the Goodwins showed up? Similar to the recent mind-numbing rejection of a property transfer tax in Sea Pines by the residents, it’s obvious that most of them aren’t paying any attention at all.

Those in power need to change the discussion. What does the Alliance — this small but loud minority — propose as the next move if the Goodwins go packing? Amazon’s withdrawal from New York won’t dent that economy, but what would the departure of the Goodwins do to our small island tourist economy and the RBC Heritage golf tournament? I don’t want to find out.

U.S. House bill offers hope on climate change

Thank you for your story acknowledging the impacts of a changing climate in “Storm-lashed SC reassesses global warming’s impacts.”

South Carolina is suffering from increasingly damaging storms and sea-level rise, incurring property damage, affecting real-estate values, and harming our thriving tourist industry. At the same time our beloved coastlines and sea-life are threatened by the concurrent pressures to drill for oil off our shores.

It may be hard to see the direct relationship between the effects of a changing climate and the pressures to drill, unless we recognize that they are both costs of our reliance on fossil fuels.

There are things we can do to reduce both impacts, however.

While we were focused on the partial federal government shutdown, an excellent climate bill, HR 763 (www.energyinnovationact.org), was introduced in the House. The bill is market-based, revenue-neutral, and bipartisan.

It works by putting a fee on carbon at the source, or at the port of entry, and returning the money to households in the form of a dividend.

This bill is endorsed by George Shultz on the right and James Hansen on the left.

Carbon fees are supported in the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, by 27 Nobel winning economists, four former Fed chairs, and 15 former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Let Rep. Joe Cunningham know you support this effort. It will shift our economy to renewable energy more quickly, slow climate change, relieve the pressure to drill off our shores, and protect our wallets at the same time.

Why tell race of suspects?

In a story about a robbery at an ATM at the Bank of America site, the robbers were both identified as black men with height and weight specified. I suppose white men wouldn’t have done such a thing? (So much for trying to eliminate racism.) Couldn’t the story have been written without specifying the skin color of the suspects?

This story was originally published February 22, 2019 at 8:25 AM.