12 Tuesday, April 3, 2001 Concerns or our coverage? Contact the leaders’ advocate at anthuikmanieunc.edu or call 933-4611. Jonathan Chaney EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR Kim Minugh uNivEßsrrv editor Ginny Sciabbarrasi cite editor Board Editorials Livin’ It Up A rental licensing program provides benefits for both renters and neighbors. The Chapel Hill Town Council should lend its approval. The world would be ideal if we could all get along. Fortunately, the local Rental Licensing Task Force is attempting to make that possible - at least with student housing. On March 26, the Rental Licensing Task Force presented the Chapel Hill town man ager with recommendations to implement a proposed licensing program for landlords and renters. It is an effort to make both par ties more accountable. The task force is attempting to relieve the flurry of complaints that residents have lodged through the years in near-campus neighborhoods about problems with noise, garbage and parking around student rentals. A city-run database will be created, pro viding renters with information from the applications of the landlord. It lists the address of rental properties, the number of tenants living there, the amount of parking available and contact information of the landlord. Noise ordinance information, garbage management, parking regulations and expected tenant conduct also will be included in the application. That information will give students a heads up of the rules of a rental before they enter irito a contract. And it will give neigh bors recourse when they have to deal with bad renters. They can contact landlords Troubling Trends President George W. Bush has made another environmental misstep in abandoning the Kyoto accord instead of trying to make it work. In recent weeks, President George W. Bush has continued on a disturbing trend. After breaking campaign promises on cut ting arsenic levels in drinking water and car bon dioxide emissions by power plants, the new president has announced that the United States will back out of the Kyoto accord. It is a decision that wrongly sacrifices the environment for economic concerns. The Kyoto accord is an international agreement that aims to fight global warming and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. President Clinton had signed the treaty, but the Senate has yet to ratify it. The United States already lacks credibili ty within the international community when it comes to environmental issues, particular ly with regards to air pollution. In a March 6 memo to Bush, Environmental Protection Agency head Christine Todd Whitman wrote “Mr. President, this is a credibility issue for the U.S. in the international community. It is also an issue that is resonating here at home. We need to appear engaged.” However, with his decision to reject the treaty, Bush’s stance on global warming and the environment hardly appears engaged. Though the United States only contains 4 percent of the world’s population, it releas es about 25 percent of the world’s green house gases. The international community has called on the United States to take responsibility for Readers' Forum Matt Dees’ Op-ed Piece ‘A Sermonizing Whine,’ Full of Paternalistic Ideas TO THE EDITOR: I am deeply disappointed by Matt Dees, the editor of The Daily Tar Heel, for the paternalistic view he chose to take in the midst of the David Horowitz controversy, so disappointed, I, in fact, feel betrayed. Asa 1996 alumnus of UNC, I keep abreast of what is going on around the Triangle by regularly perusing local news papers through the Internet, including the DTH. When I learned of the uproar the Horowitz ad caused at Duke, I knew that UNC would not be able to avoid this dis pute. On April 2, when the DTH gave exten sive coverage to the issue, I thought the first three columns I read (those of Moore and Taylor, Chancellor Moeser and even Horowitz) were expressions of respect for the intelligence of die campus community. The authors put forth their opinions and allowed us all to think, or think more Matt Df.es EDITOR Office Hours Friday 2 p.m. -3 p.m. Alex Kaplun STATE & NATIONAL EDITOR Rachel Carter SPORTS EDITOR Jermaine Caldwell FEATURES EDITOR about negligent tenants so that they can deal with problems instead of police. Some on the Town Council have concerns, including the cost and improper use of the database. But costs of the license would be nominal for landlords. And the system is simple to set up, so that cost will be limited for the town as well. It also will not be possible to misuse the site because it will only allow documented violation reports to be posted for open view ing, not simply a bulletin board for renters’ venting. This complaint-driven program does not call for anew town employee. The building inspector would investigate only after com plaints were lodged, then contact tenants or property owners to mitigate any problems. So the program will not be burdensome on the town. For the 15,000 to 16,000 students not housed on campus, the thought is that this will add to steadiness and help maintain community fife in area neighborhoods. The University and the town will improve because of this ingenious, yet simple plan. It would be in the best interests of all involved to implement this rental licensing program as soon as possible. its pollution -and the Kyoto accord is a step in the right direction. But now, if President Bush retains his cur rent position and essentially abandons a treaty that has taken more than three years to craft, the United States might irreversibly harm the success of future international agreements on the environment. Rather than abandon the Kyoto accord, President Bush should actively seek to amend the treaty to make it more palatable to the United States’ economy. Progress in that area had already been made by the Clinton administration. Emissions trading among countries is one such proposal that would ease the financial burdens of the treaty. By ignoring the problem rather than accepting responsibility and working towards a solution, President Bush is making his com mitment to big business at the expense of the environment all too clear. If the Kyoto accord is truly flawed, the Bush administration should strive to make it better rather than give up and put the entire issue on the back burner. Because greenhouse gases have such a detrimental -some would argue a potential ly catastrophic - effect on the environment, the Bush administration should hasten to work with the international community and solve this problem. Future generations should not be forced to live in an unsafe environment because of sluggish action by the current generation. deeply, about free speech, the nature of intellectual discourse and respect for self and others. Dees’ column, on the other hand, is a sermonizing whine from the DTH bully pulpit full of paternalistic phrases: “giving them the opportunity,” “privilege given” and “good faith effort we made to be sen sitive to the black community’s concerns.” Interspersed are insults that call the beliefs and interests of those who did not want the DTH to publish the ad “ridiculous” and “inconsequential.” As Dees informs us that the DTH edit board is “considerably liber al” I could not help but think, “How mighty white of you!” Dees need be concerned that oppressed communities will more than likely find the tone, intent, and content of his writings to be offensive. As we should have all learned throughout this debate, free speech, includ ing speech that we consider “ridiculous,” is a right in America, not a “privilege” that can be “given.” To use such terms when addressing the opinions and concerns of people of color and women is to place one self in assumed position of power over oth- Opinion (Thr HktUij could do to a disarmed peo ple. More than 50 million victims of last cen tury’s genocides i whisper warnings of their gun control experiei ices from mass graves. Today in the 1 Jnited States, the idea of citi zens taking up di e family weapons against the greatest military j lower in the history of the world seems a little silly. The thought was just as silly to the first few rebels in the mountains of Afghanistan and t he jungles of Vietnam. And it seemed pretty sill y to most in 1776, when Colonial gun-nuts Washington and Jefferson risked hanging to ensure your freedom. The libertarian s who put together our Constitution unde :rstood the awesome power of deterrence. Thi; Second Amendment is just the final check on a heavily checked-and-bal anced govemmen t, and we should be thankful that this need rem ains so remote. But we must alv /ays stay vigilant, for if the politicians can disable the Second Amendment, they -can threaten the First. Russ Helms, a Ph. D. candidate in biostatistics from Chapel Hill, de fends his home with two large dogs. E-mail: rt ielms@bios.unc.edu. sand are often the same people who hold the most conservative political and ethical views. How does the “right-to-lifer” who finds great moral indignity in abortion, not tap into that same indignity when it comes to dealing with such issues as poverty, hunger, the death penalty and other global human rights violations? That people who tout themselves as “pro-life” are willing to cam paign, protest, rally, cry and even kill for a social issue whose ethical poles are far from clear, only make it more maddening that that same vitriol is never directed toward raising our awareness of the unmistakable crimes that human beings perpetrate against other living human beings each day. The fact that activist groups like the GAP have chosen instead to champion a firmly entrenched, rhetorically static and political ly delineated issue not only makes their out cry seem all the more disingenuous, it undermines their credibility by emphasiz ing an indefensible moral myopia. David Rinker Office Assistant . Department of Pharmacology Qlljp Saily (Ear Uppl (S) A The Daily Tar Heel wel comes reader comments and criticism. Letters to the editor should be no longer than 300 words and must be typed, double-spaced, dated and signed by no more than two people. Students should include their year, major and phone number. Faculty and staff should include their title, department and phone number. The DTH reserves the right to edit letters for space, clarity and vulgarity. Publication is not guaran teed. Bring letters to the DTH office at Suite 104, Carolina Union or e-mail forum: editdesk@unc.edu.