But though they may hate the Pax Americana, the Greens probably can’t live without it. Can’t live without the Ipods, the connectivity, the store-bought food, the cafe-bought lattes — all the ugly things made by private industry. And by paring down the redundancies in the system as wasteful and unsightly; by reducing the energy reserves of the system in favor of such fairy schemes as windmills and carbon trading the Greens have made the system far less robust than it could have been. Because they are never going to need the Design Margin. Ever. Until they do.
14 thoughts on “(A) Quote of the Day”
Comments are closed.
I have been saying for years that we will instantly have as much power as we need the second the greens cant charge their ipones.
I wish that were true. Power infrastructure takes years to create and many voters are too ignorant about the way things work to understand what must be done. The first thing that happens when the electric supply becomes unreliable is that demagogic pols blame the suppliers of electricity for “greed” or whatever. Remember CA a few years ago?
Cheap energy hasn’t just made lives more pleasant, it has also made them possible. Only by seeing man as excess does any of this make sense.
LOL. You know you can charge a phone from your car battery I hope. A small solar panel will also do the trick.
It’s global warming, you may be starting to notice it’s effects in your area, that is sucking up the power.
Pax Americana … ROTFLMAO.
The power consumption of an iPhone or iPad per se is only part of the power consumption of the ecosystem that supports it. Also need to include wireless base stations, IP routers and voice switching equipment, fiber repeaters, servers, storage arrays, etc etc. Not to mention the air conditioning systems to keep the data center equipment as a workable operating temperature.
Ginny, yes. Reminds me of the bumper sticker slogan: “live simply so that others may simply live”. It’s the economics of people who think everything is zero-sum.
When I worked for a chemical company in Louisiana some years back, Greenpeace paid our town a visit to protest PVC production, gasoline use, and other chemical production issues that, frankly, I don’t remember the details of. Our PR person used one of Greenpeace’s own videos of them protesting, riding around in boats in the rain to point out that every person in the various synthetic boats, using gas powered 2 cycle outboard motors, was also wearing a PVC rain suit, PVC hat and had on PVC boots. This was run on local TV and caused quite a bit of laughter in the community. As a well known blogger says, these restrictions and bans are “for the little people”.
Like the holier-than-thou Lefties who drive their SUVs
Once plastic grocery bags are outlawed, only outlaws will have plastic grocery bags. The end is near.
Our problems will be over when the last lawyer is strangled with the entrails of the last environmentalist.
I don’t think the hypocrisy argument works as a practical political matter. People for whom environmentalism is a substitute religion will tend to see intentions as paramount, and may discount what we might see as hypocritical behavior if it appears to be done in the service of some greater good. It might be more effective to point out the high costs of green policies in terms of their putative benefits.
Gerry – I like that!
Jonathan, you may well be right, but I believe that the minds of the “true believers” will never be changed because, as you state, it’s a religion to them, taken on faith, not facts. It’s the people in the middle, the majority, that have to be influenced, and there, I think, the hypocritical behavior does indeed resonate. It seems to me that Al Gore’s behavior did more to delegitimize him and his arguments than anything else, by causing more scrutiny of what he was saying. Laughing at these people causes them more pain than anything else.
Who as a young twenty-something would not have enjoyed a trip to Tahiti on the “green peace warrior”(?) A cruise across the Pacific, sunbathing all the way, an idyll. Then a few hours of confrontation for the local press, and a nice trip back home. What’s not to like? In addition, there were lots of bikinis around filled appropriately.
Just like the protests of 1968-1970 where there were a lot of ‘bad boys’ available willing and so on. Why else?
In partial jest.
tom