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Yesterday was Earth Day. I wanted to post this thread at that time, but I was just too busy.
On my way to work, I was listening to a folk music program on the local college radio station. The first song they played ran something like this:
Give me the warm power of the Sun;
Give me the everflowing power of a waterfall;
Give me the restless power of the wind;
Give me the comfort of a wood fire;
But take away your atomic poison power from the world.
I'm really not making that up - the last line is verbatim from the song.
Is it just my impression, or is the Green/Environmentalist movement fundamentally rooted in total denial? What their whole sentiment boils down to is the unspoken desire to pretend that there are many fewer humans than actually exist - preferably none, in some cases.
While the chorus of that song is filled with all the artificial simplicity and sweetness of a Thomas Kincaid painting, there are some facts that they fundamentally just ignore:
1) Solar energy is a burgeoning technology. It has great promise, but at the moment, that's all it has. The world's largest privately-owned manufacturer of solar panel systems is located a few miles from my house. They're doing amazing things - but the technology is still 50 years from making a significant impact in global energy use.
2) Hydroelectric power requires dams - BIG dams - and last I heard, those self-same environmentalists were screaming about the destruction of habitat caused by building them and flooding the valleys above. Which is worse?
3) Wind power is a great idea, like solar. Too bad it's 50 years behind that - though maybe it will get there eventually.
4) Burning wood - particularly in the quantities required to heat the homes of, say, New York or London - would cause air pollution on a scale that makes the LA freeway look like a giant air freshener. Not to mention the deforestation - where do they think all those friggin' trees come from?
5) In addition to all this - in the last line, the singer rails against the one power source that just might give us what we need long enough for solar, wave-motion, and wind power to make a difference! So instead of clean - and safe when properly designed - nuclear power, she wants us to rely on ever more burning of hydrocarbons and ever more pollution. Has she forgotten that something needs to generate the electricity to charge her electric car? Or is it just that it doesn't fit into her picture-perfect little pre-industrial fantasy world, so it simply gets denied?
It really seems to me that, fundamentally, this type of person wishes we could live in some sort of 18th-century agrarian community, with the implied (but unacknowledged) desire to reduce our population numbers to that level. How this is supposed to occur is never addressed - it's just supposed to happen, and it's probably the government's job to magically do it. At any rate it's someone's job to make everything perfect.
I'm all for avoiding excessive environmental destruction - of the sort formerly practiced in the West a hudred years ago, in the ex-Soviet Union a few decades ago, and still going on today in mainland China, among other places. But this simpleminded knee-jerk "Earth First"ism is simply not reality.
Any thoughts?
On my way to work, I was listening to a folk music program on the local college radio station. The first song they played ran something like this:
Give me the warm power of the Sun;
Give me the everflowing power of a waterfall;
Give me the restless power of the wind;
Give me the comfort of a wood fire;
But take away your atomic poison power from the world.
I'm really not making that up - the last line is verbatim from the song.
Is it just my impression, or is the Green/Environmentalist movement fundamentally rooted in total denial? What their whole sentiment boils down to is the unspoken desire to pretend that there are many fewer humans than actually exist - preferably none, in some cases.
While the chorus of that song is filled with all the artificial simplicity and sweetness of a Thomas Kincaid painting, there are some facts that they fundamentally just ignore:
1) Solar energy is a burgeoning technology. It has great promise, but at the moment, that's all it has. The world's largest privately-owned manufacturer of solar panel systems is located a few miles from my house. They're doing amazing things - but the technology is still 50 years from making a significant impact in global energy use.
2) Hydroelectric power requires dams - BIG dams - and last I heard, those self-same environmentalists were screaming about the destruction of habitat caused by building them and flooding the valleys above. Which is worse?
3) Wind power is a great idea, like solar. Too bad it's 50 years behind that - though maybe it will get there eventually.
4) Burning wood - particularly in the quantities required to heat the homes of, say, New York or London - would cause air pollution on a scale that makes the LA freeway look like a giant air freshener. Not to mention the deforestation - where do they think all those friggin' trees come from?
5) In addition to all this - in the last line, the singer rails against the one power source that just might give us what we need long enough for solar, wave-motion, and wind power to make a difference! So instead of clean - and safe when properly designed - nuclear power, she wants us to rely on ever more burning of hydrocarbons and ever more pollution. Has she forgotten that something needs to generate the electricity to charge her electric car? Or is it just that it doesn't fit into her picture-perfect little pre-industrial fantasy world, so it simply gets denied?
It really seems to me that, fundamentally, this type of person wishes we could live in some sort of 18th-century agrarian community, with the implied (but unacknowledged) desire to reduce our population numbers to that level. How this is supposed to occur is never addressed - it's just supposed to happen, and it's probably the government's job to magically do it. At any rate it's someone's job to make everything perfect.
I'm all for avoiding excessive environmental destruction - of the sort formerly practiced in the West a hudred years ago, in the ex-Soviet Union a few decades ago, and still going on today in mainland China, among other places. But this simpleminded knee-jerk "Earth First"ism is simply not reality.
Any thoughts?
All this will happen before we can destoy it ourselves.
and anywhere within 200 miles of the equator will be virtually unihabitable.
