No shit, Sherlock

 Laboratory name change spells trouble

Re: “The National Renewable Energy Lab is renamed,” Dec. 3 news story

Changing the name of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to the National Laboratory of the Rockies may seem inconsequential to the casual newsreader, but it’s a true harbinger of this administration’s brutal neutralizing of clean-energy technology development in the United States.

It’s hard to know what the “Laboratory of the Rockies” actually will be; maybe something like analyzing professional baseball in Colorado or such. Regardless, the laboratory soon will lose its position as the leading applied science lab in the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratory System for developing marketable, clean-energy technologies. This has been done primarily through NREL’s long-term research relationships with American business concerns.

Three more years of slash-and-burn of these relationships will cause irreparable harm to American leadership in this critical 21st-century sector, allowing China dominance for years to come. Bad news for Colorado, bad news for the United States. Very sad.

— John A. Herrick, Denver