Jed Clampett's Revenge
The shamelessly intelligent Jonah Goldberg has a shamelessly intelligent column up at NRO pointing out that oil is the greenest energy there is:
If you remove the argument over climate change from the equation (as even European governments are starting to do), one thing becomes incandescently clear: Fossil fuels have been one of the great boons both to humanity and the environment, allowing forests to regrow (now that we don’t use wood for heating fuel or grow fuel for horses anymore) and liberating billions from backbreaking toil.
Hit the link and read the whole thing, but for me the overall point is that a media more dedicated to narrative virtue than truth, and an opposition (that's us, folks) too fearful of offending the elite intellectual power base, allow a poisonous atmosphere of falsehood to envelop this and other issues. Not just on the environment, but on spending too and religion and Israel, the battle we're waging is a battle between we who believe the truth is what sets you free and those who believe the truth is whatever story wins.
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May '10
Re: Jed Clampett's Revenge
The book that addresses in detail what the Right Dr. Klavan says is Hard Green by Peter Huber.
Re: Jed Clampett's Revenge
Novelist Flannery O'Connor: "Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you."
Re: Jed Clampett's Revenge
Here's what I don't understand: why is it that the left's answer to the Big Questions of the day -- how to keep and stay healthy; how to power our cities; how to get to work on time; how to educate our children -- are all so retro? Always about rationing, less, making do. We'll just have to rely on the wind. We'll just have to bike everywhere. We'll just have to let the old-line labor unions sort it out. The pie, for liberals, is always getting smaller. Despite saying "Yes We Can" all the time, it's always about what we can't do.
Oil, as Jonah correctly notes, is here to stay, at least for the next century or so. So are oil spills. Cleaning up an oil spill is a question of technology, right? So imagine a presidential speech last night that talked about that -- about creating a race to see who, in a nation of entrepreneurs, can invent the best way to mop up a spill -- rather than one that talked about lawsuits and other nonsense?
May '10
Re: Jed Clampett's Revenge
Rob, so well put!
Re: Jed Clampett's Revenge
Rob, who needs entrepreneurs when you've got attorneys? Michael Bromwich, the new head of the Minerals Management Service is a prosecutor best known for trying to send Oliver North to the slammer back in the halcyon days of Iran-Contra. News is that he will "lead a crackdown on the oil and gas industry." He replaces Elizabeth Birnbaum, "a former general counsel for the conservation group 'American Rivers.'"
How can the new lawyer with no expertise in oil and gas be expected to do a better job regulating energy companies and preventing disasters than the inexperienced lawyer Obama just fired? We are told that a key qualification is that Bromwich has no ties to the oil and gas industry. Great. I have no ties to Big Farm, so I expect Obama to appoint me Secretary of Agriculture any day.
May '10
Re: Jed Clampett's Revenge
But George, I bet you know a thing or two about animal husbandry being all medical and stuff... :-)