NoFrakkingConsensus:
The WWF thinks we should all “live in harmony with nature.” Sounds great – except for the flies, wasps, venomous snakes, storms, and floods.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is launching a new campaign tomorrow. The related press release is embargoed, but sympathetic websites have already broken that embargo by reporting on it ahead of time.
Called “Seize Your Power,” this campaign dovetails beautifully with Bill McKibben’scampus divestment project. Its main message is that fossil fuels are evil and that an additional $40 billion needs to be invested in renewable energy.
Never mind that, everywhere they’ve been tried, green energy sources have proven to be “unaffordable, unworkable and unconnectable” – as the blogger known asTory Aardvark so pithily remarks (for the gory details, see my recent post here).
You know what they say about leading a horse to water. Despite all that contrary evidence, the church of the WWF clings to its green dogma. These folks BELIEVE. They will not be swayed.
The Seize Your Power campaign has its own web page that urges us to “sign the pledge.” It begins with two preposterous statements:
We believe our future can, and should, be powered by nature. [bold in original]
The energy systems in place across the planet within the next four years will define the world’s climate change path for generations. [bold added]
Coal, oil, and natural gas are part of nature’s bounty. Insisting that there’s something “unnatural” about these fossil fuels is juvenile.
Moreover, anyone who thinks that what we do in the next four years will dictate what happens for generations is delusional. We live in an era of fast-paced technological change. New developments are continuously redrawing the map.
The Google search engine is only 15 years old. iPods are only 12 years old. 3D printing will soon become affordable for ordinary people. The world is being remade all the time – at an ever-accelerating rate.
The future is never set in stone. Four years is a number the WWF has plucked out of the air. It’s a number intended to make us feel anxious, to poison our lives with fear. That’s what the WWF specializes in: anxiety and fear.
By signing the WWF’s pledge you are calling on “financial institutions and governments worldwide to act immediately to invest more in sustainable energy powered by wind, water and the sun.” You are supporting “a just transition from the dirty and unsustainable energy of today.”
If living in harmony with nature was so great our ancestors never would have quit living in caves.
The green energy companies have profited greatly from the government handouts. They get their multimillion dollar grants or loans, then they go bankrupt. Can anyone name ANY that got a grant or a loan that is still in business?
I was reading the other day how a much larger proportion of solar panels fail early than predictions had claimed.
Apparently, they get dirty and, when cleaned, they lose part of their valuable coatings.
Also, the best places for them are the dirtiest….deserts….and water to clean them with there is expensive.
I just moved to Utah, little town of Holladay.
Only 26,000 people.
Nearly that many horses and other livestock.
Plenty of open space.
Loads of culverts filled with ducks and geese.
Swallows swoop through the air scooping up mosquitoes and other flying insects.
There are wasps, bees and biting gnats.
One of Mitt Romney’s five sons has his home a few streets over.
And now Mitt has bought near him, too.
Zones for livestock so his wife can ride on her own property.
I just hope their presence doesn’t cause a big build-up here.
I’m as close to nature as I care to be.
algore is living proof that you can live in luxury with nature. Juts predict catastrophe, set up a quasi environmental origination, ask for money to save, the planet, the whales, the polar bears, the fish, the bugs just convince the unwashed masseses that we are in peril and sit back a laugh at their gullibility..
I’ll take these folk seriously when they give up their ipods, computers, flatscreens, cars, and other modern gizmos for the Amish lifestyle.
BTW, Photovoltaics are not the only way to harvest solar energy. It’s just the most simple. A better idea might be banks of mirrors focused on a heat collector. One of these was canned by EPA regs when the working fluid they wanted to use was banned. Another uses molten salt as the heat collector. In that system, the salt also acts as a storage medium, allowing the system to generate power after dark and on cloudy days. That’s handy, because there’s no good way to store huge amounts of electric power…. otherwise we’d all be driving those electric cars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Tres_Power_Tower
Cool, but it would still take up a lot of ground.
@Nan G: Great move from Long Beach. Good for you. Mitt’s got many props. including La Jolla.
Mormons should be great neighbors. Ya gonna convert?
From an email that I received this morning that fits this thread perfectly (Some of which is a tad before my time, but not much. TV screens were a little bigger):
This explains a lot about how we grew up way back when
Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to me the other day, that I should bring my own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.
I apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.”
The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”
She was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.
Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.
Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books. But too bad we didn’t do the green thing back then.
We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.
Back then, we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days.Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.
Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana . In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right; we didn’t have the green thing back then.
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the green thing back then.
Back then, people took the street car or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room , not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.
But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we older folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?
We don’t like being older in the first place so don’t piss us off.
@another vet: Thanks for posting that… one quibble… I bet that TV the size of Montana uses less power than one of those handkerchief screen jobs. 😉
@Jim S: True about the TV but when you consider that nowadays most of the “environmentally conscience” have one of the large ones in just about every room in the house, it more than makes up for it!
@another vet: I really liked your post.
Too true.
Some of these ”greenies,” have no idea how wasteful they are!
@Richard Wheeler:
It has (so far) turned out to be a great move.
I am a native Californian and will be going into my very first winter with snow and weather and such this year.
He he.
Should be a learning experience.
So far, on the LDS front, the ones I’ve met have all been really nice and neighborly.
A housewife who bakes her own bread lives about a block away and my next-door neighbor told her I was having a tough time re-jiggering recipes for this altitude.
(We are well over 5,000 feet)
So, she called by and we are baking bread together once a week.
I have been to the local church once and been gifted with about $50 worth of yarn, crochet needles and yardage just because I mentioned I left it all behind rather than pack it at $.60/pound.
But no pressure.
This last weekend was a gay pride parade wherein most Christian churches might simply say, hey, we love the sinner, but hate the sin, or something equally basic.
Not the LDS church.
I would get a headache trying to figure out the mental pretzel they bent their church doctrine into so they could march in the parade with the gays.
But so far no one wants to talk about doctrine with me or hubby.
@Nan G: I have never met people that are more into “community” and helping and relating to all than LDS. Sounds like a wonderful place to live.
My wife volunteers for a wonderful org. called “Mercy for Animals” We’re going up to W.Hollywood to distribute literature at “Pride Weekend” She’s gonna be real surprised at Sunday’s parade.
Semper Fi
@Nan G: #3
So far, NONE of the green energy stuff is working like we were told it would. If they did work, the private sector would be fighting each other to produce the most of whatever works. The GREEN thing is just another con game for certain people to make a lot of money from the government.
Your town is about 26 times too large for me. I used to jokingly say, “If the town has a traffic light, or a four-lane road, it’s too large for me.” When I retired, I looked for towns of about 1,000 people, and found one with no traffic lights at all, and no four-lane roads. Most of the town has dirt streets. My kind of town.
@Jim S: #5
obama told a graduating college class not to get their information from electronic devices. All dedicated conservatives know why he doesn’t want them to get their info that way. I guess he doesn’t want anybody reading John 8:32 in the Bible, where it says, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
@Richard Wheeler: #6
You reminded me of a conversation I heard in a Utah restaurant, between a waitress and a customer. The customer asked the waitress, “How does it feel since you left the Mormon church?” She answered, “I look at it this way. I got a 10% raise, and weekends off.” I’m still laughing at that one.
@Smorgasbord:
What, did Obama buy telegraph, newspaper and magazine stock? How technologically backward can you get?
Rural communities have lived in harmony with nature for millennium. We raised our own food in efficient sustainable methods. Yet, this progressive policy economy has more and people leaving the agricultural lifestyle to live in the cities. We used to take broken appliances to shops for repairs and things were built to last. It’s now SOP with urban and suburbia to throw away “obsolete” technology when the newest and latest comes out. The eco-fanatic crowd correctly lambasted the dumping of mercury and other toxic substances, yet they have forced us to go with mercury containing CFL’s and a growing amount of the goods we buy are manufactured in foreign nations that don’t follow our EPA standards.
Seems counter productive to me, if the object of progressive change is for us all to live in harmony with nature.
@Ditto: #15
We are also not supposed to listen to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or Joe The Plumber. We are not supposed to read Drudge, World Net Daily, or any other conservative blog.
Has any other president told us not to read, listen, or watch anybody before obama did? The good news is that, as far as I know, everyone who obama wants us to stay away from has had their readership and listenership go much higher.
@Smorgasbord:
I’m sure that’s true, but I was referring to the hypocrisy of these folks. They want everyone else to give up their toys, but not them. They also want or don’t care that all the dirty industry that supports their lifestyle goes overseas to some third world dirt hole. If I were like the lefties out there, I could flop down the “race card” on these folks who don’t care if Chinese peasants are poisoned to produce their iphone or windturbine…