Letters: Electric cars, sustainability, and attitudes toward the rich

We had the CEO of Dow Chemical on the broadcast yesterday. Talked about how he wants to make Dow more of a consumer products kind of a company and about the state of American industry.

Liz Hoffman wrote to say we left something out.

Liz Hoffman: Andrew Liveris has an easy laugh and a charming accent. And the “rebranding” of Dow sounds like a benign enough corporate mission. However, simply Google “Lawsuits against Dow Chemical” and you’ll see pages and pages of litigation reports — from Dow’s toxic crop chemicals to GMO corn.

If you’re in the market for an electric car, there’s going to be one more brand to choose from. We told you this week Toyota’s going electric with an plug-in version of the RAV-4. It’ll set you back, oh, about $50,000.

Jeff Campbell from Round Rock, Texas, said… really?!

Jeff Campbell: We recently converted our ’89 VW Cabriolet to all-electric. It cost $18,100. To hear that Toyota throw out that it costs twice as much to roll out the Toyota RAV4, it was infuriating.

There was some listener dissatisfaction with my interview yesterday with Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport, part of our regular Attitude Check. The topic du jour was what Americans think about the rich. We don’t hate ’em is the short answer. We’d like to be rich, too.

But Weston Pringle from Whittier, Calif., said I missed the point.

Weston Pringle: I do not believe that people resent the rich. Even the Occupiers do not resent the rich. The question should be do the rich have too much control over our politics and are they paying their fair share? Should the voices of this 1 percent count more than the voices of the other 99 percent?

Write to us. Praise, problems — we read ’em all.