House of Eratosthenes

I remember thirty years ago there was a big-time environmental movement going on. The Ad Council put on television commercials, with an image of an Indian crying over a littered cityscape. Some people did ecologically-friendly things, most people did not. The people who did, acted smug. Sanctimonious. Better-than-you.

I miss the smugness.

Because their successors, today, can lecture you about how the planet is doomed — the planet is doomed! — and if the two of you happen to walk past a Hummer H2 while he’s flinging his environmentalist spittle in your direction, he won’t bat an eyelash. And nobody has the cojones to say, it seems: Hey, you just talked about the human race coming to an end and the planet becoming uninhabitable. Have you no comment on this machine we just walked past? None?

Now, here’s the bee up my butt. I don’t have anything against the tree-huggers of yesteryear for being smug. And for being craven hypocrites, I don’t bear any malice against the tree-huggers today. My jaundiced eye beats down, instead, on people who believe what the environmental activists of today tell them…everything…without even blinking.

Because, let’s just admit it. In my hypothetical about the spittle-flinging environmentalist, going on about global warming, and greenhouse gases, and George Bush this and Kyoto Treaty that, blah blah blah, and the two of you are walking along and you pass the H2 and he has nothing to say about it whatsoever — let’s just agree outright, you’ve got better than even odds the environmentalist has nothing to say against the H2 because it happens to belong to him.

That’s the situation we have today.

You doubt me? Well, let’s take a look at what we have going on here. Via Drudge Report, via Boortz, we come to find out about a speech delivered by the distinguished Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.

Illinois Senator Barack Obama warns citizens at his 50th Town Hall meeting about gas guzzling, WPSD-TV reports.

It was among many points made to the standing room only audience at the Metropolis Community Center. Obama spoke on everything from DC politics to global warming.

He says part of the blame for the world’s higher temperatures rests on gas guzzling vehicles. Obama says consumers can make the difference by switching to higher mileage hybrids.

Today the Senator said, “It would save more energy, do more for the environment and create better world security than all the drilling we could do in Alaska.”

“After the meeting… Obama left in a GMC Envoy after admitting to favoring SUV’s himself,” claimed local News Channel 6.

MORE

Tommy Vietor, Senator Obama’s press secretary, explains: “What Senator Obama has long advocated is the use of vehicles that are more fuel efficient, including but not exclusively hybrids.

“The vehicle senator obama travels in while in illinois is a Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV), which can run on e85, a blended fuel made of 85 percent ethanol.

“So he in fact was practicing what he preached at the town hall meeting in Metropolis yesterday when he said we must drive fewer gas-guzzling vehicles.”

But it does not appear that GMC’s Envoy is E85 ready.

Developing…

See what I mean? I don’t blame Sen. Obama and people like him; I blame people for believing the hype.

People are talking about the planet’s looming failure to continually support life as we know it. Well, not all of them. But show me someone who thinks we should “take global warming seriously,” and I’ll show you someone who…at the very least…is advancing the notion that humanity, as a whole, faces — if not extinction, then health risks. Physical injury of some kind. All of us, everyone with a pair of lungs and a beating heart and a patch of skin.

People aren’t going to start thinking critically just because I wish they would. But when you have a high-profile senator giving a lecture on our gas-guzzling ways and how we contribute to global warming — for the fiftieth time! — and then, afterward, hopping into a gas guzzler and lumbering away, that’s just silly. And not a little bit. It’s up to Monty Python levels.

And there is nothing unusual about it. This is not an isolated incident. To simply wish for a global warming guy to behave as if we have a problem here, about as serious as what he’s claiming, is to wish for something you won’t be getting and just about everyone can tell you, you ought not expect. And then the bullshit comes cascading down upon us, and half of us are ready to dive in with spoons, and beg for seconds.

You folks who like to all fall for the same crap en masse, because it gives you that sense of togetherness…can’t you find something else? I’m sure there’s something in your personal e-mail from a guy who wants you to help him smuggle money out of Nigeria, why don’t you think about goin’ for that one?

This is a topic near and dear to me. I happen to have a degree in Meteorology. And I understand what is behind global warming theory.

I also understand Scientific Method, and have a good grasp on Climatology — which is why I come down more on the Michael Crichton side of things on this issue.

One of my close relatives considers himself a Kerry Democrat, America is always wrong, the Rethugligcans are screwing the environment… all that. Yet my car gets 38 mpg on the highway… and his gets… 14.

But it’s a cool car!!!!

I consider myself an environmentalist, as I think most sane people would. Once you’ve been to our great National Parks, it’s very hard to be indifferent. On the other hand, I do not put myself in the class of people who think that everything man does is bad, and everything nature does outside of man is good. There is a balance to strike. Man is a part of nature just as much as termites and Bison are – both of which, by the way, produce greenhouse gasses (methane as well as carbon dioxide).

I’d also like to know how green, in the long run, biofuel is. There’s some sort of

f(x) = f(energy consummed in production + soil depletion – carbon dioxide removed + carbon dioxide emitted from burning)

equation that ought to be worked out — then compared to gasoline.

Need to keep working on that nuclear equation — when someone figures that one out, we’re good to go for quite a while.
- Phil | 08/16/2006 @ 17:30
There’s an interesting editorial on this within the latest Car & Driver written by Patrick Bedard.

Lockjaw
- Lockjaw45 | 08/17/2006 @ 06:56

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Missing The SmugnessWednesday, August 16th, 2006

Missing The Smugness
Wednesday, August 16th, 2006