Editor, Daily Nexus,

Proposition 87 helps Californians. Despite the lie-infested commercials that oil corporations are airing these days, these companies are only looking out for their record profits. Take Chevron: It spent $12 million on misleading TV ads as a deliberate scare tactic. Collectively, oil companies are using their profit earnings and are pouring about $45 million into fighting the Clean Alternative Energy Act. I am sure most of you were fed up with the high gas prices we all faced not too long ago, and they are still too high, compared to what they were before our recent entanglement in the Middle East.

Proposition 87 reduces our dependence on oil by replacing it with clean, domestic and cheaper energy. The funds for this change need to come from record oil profit earnings received last year, such profits from the first quarter of this year and the tax breaks that the heavily Republican-controlled Congress has been giving out since the Republicans took control. Let us make oil companies pay their fair share in research for alternative energy. Oil companies can afford it. They made $78 billion in profits last year.

Prop 87 will reduce gasoline and diesel usage by 25 percent over the next 10 years. It will reduce air pollution that causes asthma attacks, lung disease and cancer. It will strengthen national security by making us less exposed to economic threats from foreign entanglements. It will create new clean energy jobs and keep our economy growing. It makes oil companies pay their fair share for extracting oil from California’s land. Oil companies pay billions in oil drilling fees in Louisiana, Alaska and Texas, but they pay almost nothing in our state. Prop 87 makes passing the cost of new programs to Californians illegal.

JOSE RAYGOZA