Don and Sondra Samuels and their six fellow petitioners have won their lawsuit against Minneapolis, forcing the city to live up to its charter requirements for at least adequate police staffing and funding ("Judge supports activists seeking more Minneapolis police officers," front page, July 2). The group won this battle in the face of strong activist pressure, funded by people who believe their money knows what's best for our city. The argument of these pressure groups, and the City Council members who promote their mantra, is that the Minneapolis Police Department is irredeemable and incapable of reform and must be defunded and dismantled. As former Council Member Don Samuels pointed out in an interview on Minnesota Public Radio, when city officials make policing itself the target, they send a green light message to the criminal element — already against the police themselves — that they can act with impunity. The main victims of this activist mythology are the residents of the North Side themselves and other hard-hit neighborhoods, as Samuels forcefully explained.

I hope other Minneapolis residents are as proud of and grateful for these eight petitioners as I am. Over the coming weeks, we need to push hard for MPD reform, searching for better ways to reduce community/police antagonism and rein in police bias, brutality and misconduct. There are specific means to do this, as we already know — though they require a lot of real work and sustained resolve. At the same time, we need to take a hard, skeptical look at utopian activist mantras — coming from those planted very far away from actual Minneapolis neighborhoods like the North Side — to revise the city charter, hamstring MPD management with a climate of suspicion, reduce mayoral oversight and generally shuffle money around based on a fundamental animus against policing in general.

That is not the way to solve the grinding, immediate and often tragic crisis of crime and violence that hits the poorest neighborhoods of our city most of all.

Henry Gould, Minneapolis

Isaac Orr's opinion regarding Xcel's premature retirement of a largely depreciated coal plant is superficial ("Wrong incentives drive wind, solar," Opinion Exchange, June 28). It's true utility returns are pegged off investments. And it's true that capital investments depreciate in value and that returns, consequently, diminish at the same time.

This misses the real problem with returns. That is that utilities and many corporations get to offload many of their costs on the rest of us. They do not have to pay for costs of climate change, costing us more and more every day in extreme, unpredictable weather. They neither are required to pay for the dirty air they spew out causing high levels of asthma nor do they pay for the tremendous medical bills caring for people with asthma. Also, utilities, for free, have spewed dangerous pollutants such as mercury into the air to fall onto our lakes so that now a multitude of Minnesota lakes have advisories about eating fish and swimming. All those expenses and costs are freely given to utilities and many other corporations. The bill is paid for by Minnesota citizens.

That is the real problem. Orr, like a coal plant, blows a lot of smoke around mumbo jumbo like depreciated assets. In the light of clean air, it is easy to see that the retirement of Xcel's coal plant will bring huge benefits to the health of Minnesotans, reduce their medical costs and reduce dangerous pollutants in our lakes, and it shows leadership in dealing with climate change.

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Words included in Orr's counterpoint about renewable energy incentives: profits, costs, pay, depreciation, expensive, prices, and dollars in the millions and billions.

Words appearing nowhere in that piece: drought, forest fires, rising seas, severe storms, desertification, coral bleaching, climate migration.

With this tunnel vision, the Center of the American Experiment (CAE) and its associates demonstrate why they must be excluded from the discussion about how to meet our ongoing energy needs. What price should we put on clean air and water? At what point does ocean acidification become too much? Should we spend our resources to prevent further damage or to accommodate what may now be inevitable? These are difficult answers to come up with, but the CAE isn't even asking the questions. Instead, you can read gems like this on the CAE's website: "[E]conomic growth and expanded prosperity are the surest path to lifting the world's poor and protecting the environment."

It simply doesn't work that way. The consequences of climate change cause enormous financial harm (which the counterpoint doesn't even consider), but it's so much more than that. Ask the Central Americans who had to abandon a generations-long farming livelihood and are now knocking on our nation's door about prosperity. Or ask fellow citizens in the American West facing tough choices between which crops to give up on and which lands to fallow about how that economy is working for them. Ask the officials managing Lake Mead, now at its lowest levels ever, if they are sleeping well at night. Ask any resident of the West Coast how much they enjoyed that shroud of smoke over their homes last summer.

Jeff Naylor, Minneapolis

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Canceling the Xcel gas plant in Becker is a great move for both environmental and financial reasons ("Xcel drops plan for large gas plant," June 26). I am a Minnesotan who values clean air and water and want to protect these for our children. Natural gas is dangerous to our water sources and our climate. Climate warming methane, leaked during production and transit, eliminates its advantage over burning coal. This plant directly threatened our children's safe future. Their future should be the first consideration when making our choices for new energy investment.

In addition, this gas plant would have been obsolete early in its life cycle, costing us many millions in wasted investment. Our best data supports the commercial availability of long-term storage flow batteries within 10 years, which will provide the required backup energy storage from wind and solar. By 2031, these clean energy combo plants are projected to be cheaper to build and operate compared to operating an expensive gas plant. This would have required mothballing this dirty-fuel investment soon after it went online, wasting precious environmental and financial resources that we cannot afford. Kudos to Xcel for seeing the light.

Mark Andersen, Wayzata

Disappointment turned to disgust as the final insult to us loyal fans that as we walked back through the concourse to the exits, I looked out to the field only to see the grounds crew watering the infield.

Mike Schafer, Minnetonka