Dear Editor:

Regarding "Speaker: Anti-coal proposal to cost jobs, hike electric rates," May 18:In his unquestioning account of the presentation to the Lehighton 9/12 Project by Jennifer Stefano, PA State Director for Americans for Prosperity, reporter Ron Gower begins by describing Stefano as "a Philadelphia woman with no apparent ties to the coal industry" who "issued a warning…that the Obama administration could have disastrous economic impact.""No apparent ties to the coal industry?" Really?Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is a special-interest front group started by oil billionaire David Koch and Koch Industries board member Richard Fink. The Koch brothers, of course, are two of the leading and most influential financiers of anti-regulation and right-wing ideology in the United States. Their Koch Industries, a privately-held company with $100 billion in revenue per year, is heavily invested in the extraction, transportation and combustion of carbon-based energy sources, including coal, petroleum and natural gas.In failing to alert readers to Ms. Stefano's real agenda and balance coal-industry propaganda with the facts about the disastrous impacts of coal mining and combustion on human and ecological health and global climate change, The Times News does its readers a great disservice.We, the people, must demand the rapid development of clean, renewable energy NOW. Mother Earth and future generations of Homo sapiens deserve no less.Shireen ParsonsSummit Hill