Opinion | Tracking the Climate Toll as Leaders Meet

To the Editor:

Re “How Autocrats Like Putin Foil Climate Efforts” (front page, Nov. 6):

We cannot wait for Russia, China, India or Saudi Arabia to take action on climate change.

On the opening day of the climate summit in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, on Sunday, the World Meteorological Organization announced that the past eight years were on track to be the warmest on record. This year has seen record-breaking heat waves and drought across the United States, China, East Africa and Europe, as well as devastating floods in Pakistan.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting global energy crisis have shown the folly of Europe’s dependence on fossil fuels from an autocratic regime. OPEC’s cuts to oil production show the risk of America’s dependence on Saudi Arabia.

While the Inflation Reduction Act will reduce America’s dependence on fossil fuels, the United States and Europe need to invest in renewable technology globally to help the rest of the world become energy independent.

This investment is ethically necessary because of the West’s outsized historical contribution to carbon emissions, and it is politically necessary to reduce the influence of autocratic regimes like Russia’s.

Thomas Turnbull
Brooklyn

To the Editor:

The U.N. secretary general, Antonio Guterres, rightly calls out the war in Ukraine for “putting climate action on the back burner while our planet itself is burning.” Yet in focusing on the fossil fuel deals Russia has cut with China, India and other nations, your coverage lacks any mention of the climate devastation directly caused by Vladimir Putin’s military aggression.

Along with the horrendous human toll that Russia’s war has taken, Mr. Putin’s drones, cruise missiles and artillery have leveled countless buildings, bridges, roads and industrial facilities across Ukraine.

Recent studies place the cost of rebuilding all that infrastructure in the hundreds of billions of dollars, possibly as high as $1 trillion. This effort at reconstruction will come at a very high price, not just in dollars but in carbon emissions. But who’s keeping tabs on the emissions toll?

At last year’s global climate summit in Glasgow, the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, signaled the need to make military emissions part of NATO’s carbon accounting, yet few nations have been willing to give that level of transparency to their military arsenals and operations.

As world leaders in Sharm el Sheikh dive into the latest round of climate negotiations, shouldn’t quantifying the climate toll of wars and war preparedness be on the table for discussion?

Philip Warburg
Newton, Mass.
The writer is a senior fellow at Boston University’s Institute for Global Sustainability.

A Senior U.S. Rabbi: ‘Israel Is More Than Its Government’

To the Editor:

Re “The Israel We Knew Is Gone,” by Thomas L. Friedman (column, Nov. 5):

Mr. Friedman’s concerns about the potential effect of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition on Israel’s future are legitimate. Should the ideologies of his most extreme partners shape the direction of the next government, Israel’s social freedoms unique in the Middle East, its growing détente with the Arab world, the vital support of the U.S. Congress and any hope of peace with the Palestinians may all be in jeopardy.

But his assertion that “synagogues in America” will now debate whether to “support this Israel or not” represents a troublesome equation of Israel’s government with the nation itself. As with America, so with Israel: One can protest the policies of the government and still support the nation.

The strength of the diaspora Jewish community’s ties with Israel must transcend the politics of the moment, no matter how fraught they may be. Israel’s well-being depends on it.

And at a time of heightened concern over increasing incidents and expressions of antisemitism, often fueled by the bond between Israel and American Jews, our critiques must be especially precise, or they may exacerbate the risk here at home. Israel is more than its government.

Joshua M. Davidson
New York
The writer is the senior rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York.

To the Editor:

“A Time for War, and for Diarists” (The Arts, Nov. 7) was so moving. I found it especially so because we recently discovered my grandmother’s diaries about her life in Pavoloch, also known in Yiddish as Pavolitch, a shtetl about 60 miles southwest of Kyiv, more than 100 years ago.

As a young woman, with just a few years of schooling, my grandmother, Anna Feldman, wrote in Yiddish and Russian about seeing her father come home from the war in a tattered uniform, the ravages of tuberculosis and typhus, refugees from destroyed villages — and her own journey into exile to Chicago.

Like the diarists in your article, she also wrote by hand, at night, by candlelight, “as a way to cope with the fear and uncertainty.”

That was a different war (the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War) and different destruction (pogroms, not Russian missiles), but I feel that her impetus for keeping a diary is shared by the Kyiv diarists of today.

We are so grateful to have these frayed, yellowing pages of her memories, and I hope that the children and grandchildren of the journal-keepers in Kyiv will be able to read of their relatives’ lives in peace and security someday.

Elaine Elinson
San Francisco

Hope for Homeless People

To the Editor:

Re “The Way Los Angeles Is Trying to Solve Homelessness Is ‘Absolutely Insane,’” by Ezra Klein (column, nytimes.com, Oct. 23):

Anyone who has followed the response of Los Angeles to homelessness nodded feverishly when they saw the headline on Mr. Klein’s column. Insane, indeed. Too costly. Not strategic. Bailing the leaking boat.

Mr. Klein does a great job of analyzing the dyspeptic responses of those running for office and the barriers to getting the job done — zoning, regulations, NIMBY. He leaves us gasping for a breath of hope given the systemic and political barriers he enumerates.

But there is hope. Not so much coming out of the current situation in L.A., but emanating from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office in Sacramento. His initiative, HomeKey, targeted at housing for homeless people through conversion of hotels and motels, cuts through concerns about zoning and other delays that hamper housing creation for years. It focuses on units that already exist — drop a kitchenette into a spiffed-up motel room and voilà, a studio apartment.

Faster than building, and cheaper, too. And not only for California. The idea is now being replicated in several other states.

So leave insanity behind. Replicate what works in a more cost-efficient way.

Philip Mangano
Los Angeles
The writer is president and C.E.O. of the American Round Table to Abolish Homelessness and former “homelessness czar” under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.