SOTU, The Environment and Green Technology (sort of)

I am really waiting to see what is going to happen once these clean/green energy initiatives get underway. A year or so back Sen Feinstein (D-CA) lead a fight to get a solar project in the Mojave Desert cancelled. It seems to me the Mojave would be a great place for a solar (and wind) project on a large scale. Several years ago the late Sen Kennedy (D-MA) put up a fight against a proposed wind farm near Cape Cod. Sen Harry Reid (D-NV) forced the end of the Yucca Mountain project that would have been the central depository of spent nuclear fuel. All three of these bubbas are are from the democrat Party, the favorite of the Greenies.  Other green energy projects have and are being fought against by the very people who you would think would embrace these projects with open arms. These folks don’t want oil, and gas. They don’t want wind turbines killing birds. They don’t want solar panels blocking the sun from reaching the endangered desert tortoise. Nuclear power doesn’t cut it for them because of the potential spent fuel issues. Clean coal doesn’t cut it either, although technology that exists today has cleaned up the air in the Northeast to the point where "acid rain" is no longer part of the conversation. Even if we went back to the Stone Age like some of the more extreme environmentalist seem bent on achieving, they’d pitch a fit if someone started a wood fire to keep warm and cook the food. I think groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club need to be ignored into extinction, then maybe more practical (and less doomsday) thinking could happen and these issues would be resolved.

Solutions are often ignored from both sides by the entrenched, TEOTWAWKI, language that is often kicked around. I am a conservative, but I also consider myself a conservationist. I couldn't live in the PACNW if I did care about the environment. I do what I can, when I can, as often as I can. I packed out my junk when I was a backpacker. I recycle and compost to point of annoying my family. I drive around in gas saving cars. But when someone from Greenpeace or the Sierra Club tells me what a terrible person I am because I haven’t dedicated my ENTIRE life to ‘mother earth’, my dander gets up. In fact, it makes me want to go buy an Excursion, throw my food into the trash, and buy stuff with tons of packing material. It’s just my contrary nature. But when someone offers me solutions that are easy to implement and provides justification that wouldn’t be considered scare tactics, I am more than willing to listen and, more importantly, consider.

This whole global warming crap is a great example. OwlGore has been trying (and lying) to scare us into obedience with the whole debunked ‘hockey stick’ graph and 20 foot sea level rises. But if he had come at from less combative dire approach, I think the push back from the right would have been considerably less. On the plus side of his aggressive approach, we were able to find out that he was only in the whole thing for the money and also basically lied so we were able to avoid all the programs he wanted to implement.