Hurrah for Tillamook dairies, and farms both small and large. I write in defense of Keebler elves and farmers, ranchers and other producers and against those who, in the name of “climate change,” want to kill the Golden Goose.

Government produces free benefits, like money, from nothing, without stink or pollution or dirt or profit. Scientists say you can’t get something from nothing, but what do they know? We don’t need farms, because we can get food from the supermarket with government food stamps. We don’t need coal, or oil, or gas, or hydro, or nuclear, because we can get electricity from government plugs.

Environmental organization lawsuits are mostly wrong and absurd. If environmentalists were forced in live in the worlds they advocate, they would have to live without cars, houses, roads, electricity, food. They want the benefits without the costs, and have no real sense of what it takes to make the world work. The energy and food revolutions are essential to modern civilization.

The Left idolizes Woody Guthrie, but even he praised the now-non-PC Bonneville Power Administration and its great dams which brought electricity to the farms and factories of the Northwest. And it was the farms and the factories which, working day and night, allowed us to win two World Wars and the Cold War, and save much of the world from slavery.

I am offended and demand an apology and reparations for your remarks about Keebler elves (in which I still believe, though I am not sure who makes Oreos).

We all have a right to food. Therefore, farmers must provide it free. So I thought, until I remembered that food does not come from farms (which are dirty places, ugh!), but rather from supermarkets, just as meat does not come from animals but from McDonald’s, and wood does not come from forests but from furniture stores in socialist Sweden.

I love my electric car, because electricity is pure and clean, and is just there. It does not come from anywhere, so we don’t need coal, diesel, nuclear plants, dams, or pipelines or transmission lines.

I live near ultra-pure (except for the homeless) Portland, with pure, clean water, electricity that comes from plugs, and houses and machines that don’t need trees to be cut, or iron and coal to be mined. Mine are made of clean steel and aluminum, which are produced by recycling.

We can get rid of those ugly and harmful dams, power lines, windmills, pipelines, coal plants, timber mills.

At worst, we can have a lovely, clean environment, and get what we need from China (which, under the Kyoto and Paris Accords, has a “God-given” right to have its turn to pollute, out of sight of the U.S.)

Urbanites — from Seattle, Portland and Eugene — regulate family farms out of existence, and then complain because there are no family farms. They move to the country, and then complain that farms are bad. They love farmers’ markets, but not the farms that  produce them.

All Americans should support farmers and ranchers, who produce our food and give us food markets, which are the envy of the world. 

Bernie Sanders and the socialists want to give us empty shelves, as in the former USSR, China before it went state capitalist and present-day Zimbabwe and Venezuela. Remember that, in those countries, they “came first” for the farmers. We can’t have the supermarkets without the farmers.

Alan L. Gallagher

Canby, Ore.