Will Sagar graduated from the University of North Carolina with a double major on Economics and Mathematics.  After selling the excavation business he built and operated for a decade, he was the Solid Waste Director for Transylvania County, NC for 16 years.  While there he started the recycling program, built the first lined landfill in Western North Carolina; implemented a Pay As You Throw program, which applied utility pricing to waste collecting resulting in a doubling of the recycling program; established a permanent Household Hazardous Waste collection; and started an electronics recycling program.  Later with Henderson County, he started electronics collection and created a county energy accounting system.

Including that Will’s column contains numerous factual errors.  The most egregious is its premise, which implies that the scientific consensus (more than 97% of peer-reviewed articles) on the causes and impacts of climate change is “political correctness”.

Instead of engaging in demagoguery around climate change like Will has done in his column, Nebraska scientists and policy makers are taking steps to address climate change. This session I introduced LR455, which created a special legislative committee to address both the risks and the opportunities from climate change for Nebraska’s people. This committee is composed of seven members from all across the state representing a wide spectrum of political views. The committee will create the framework for a Nebraska Climate Action Plan based on a consensus of scientific evidence, including input from nationally recognized experts from UNL who assembled the 2014 report on the impacts of climate change in Nebraska (Climate Change Implications for Nebraska).

To read the entire letter to the editor: http://journalstar.com/news/opinion/editorial/columnists/local-view-planning-better-than-name-calling-on-climate-change/article_294422ef-53a4-50fb-8269-c4056c07a71d.html