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Quote of the Day – Modern Living
“We’re told cars are dangerous. It’s safer to drive through South Central Los Angeles than to walk there. We’re told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We’re told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it’s hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald’s from a speeding train. And we’re told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?” — P.J. O’Rourke
It is amazing how well we live today. It is more amazing how much some people resent that. What is even more amazing is that most of these people do not resent that they are living well – they seem to resent that others live well. The Al Gores and James Hansens of this world live large while wanting everyone else to live a peasant existence. To quote Glenn Reynolds: “I’ll believe it is a crisis when they behave like it is a crisis.” Until then, sod off swampy!
Published in General
I sometimes wonder why the Left is so interested in herding us onto trains…
Well played.
Great quote.
They dislike automobiles because you can put the family in the car, take a drive and discover America for yourself. You will also discover on that road trip that Ralph Nader, Al Gore, and their fellow travelers like horses are also putting out excrement.
Hmmn, Cars? That goes with next month’s group writing theme.
Speaking of next month, the September sign-up sheet for Quote of the Day is up and available. We have twenty-seven open slots next month. Who would like to claim a few while the openings are flexible?
Nicely played.
My father was a judge for a literary prize (I forget which) and after reading several of the nominees his takeaway was, “Liberals really don’t like cars.”
On another note: There are few people so loathsome as those who go to poverty stricken areas and praise them for their, “simple,” lifestyles.
Great O’Rourke quote. Where was it said or published?
To go with the Reynolds quote, Pat Sajak wrote an essay in the early days of Ricochet that essentially said just that. Perhaps one of the PTB can resurrect it. I’m not sure how searchable the Ricochet 1.0 version remains. I’ll see if I can find it–this is the internet.
I think it’s one of Bill Bryson’s books where he debunks this whole “we owe Mother Earth everything and look how we treat her” lament. We do not owe the Earth anything. It is and always has been consistently nad implacably hostile to us as a species.
Okay, we were, finally able to muster and breed in Africa, in spite of its poisonous plants and insects, little water, and ferocious predators. The supreme benison of its year round heat, after millennia, allowed us a foothold. We lived. We bred to replacement level. And we made things. And thanks to those things, we were able to colonize cooler and even less hospitable areas of the planet.
But, without the accoutrements of the material culture we humans developed,
yes, WE did it! with no help from Mommie Dearest Gaia,
none of us could survive even a week, even in the temperate zones, in winter .
No clothes? No shelter? No fuel?
Dead of exposure in a few days, and that’s even assuming we could recall how to turn some of our living fellow creatures into edible protein.
That there are people so selfish, so deluded, that they don’t see the increasing material comfort of our species as an unqualified good is….well, I guess it’s just human nature.
Just to keep this interesting, I’ll add that not all of the environmental “awareness” trends have been whacky or opportunities for elitism.
Recycling is a very welcome innovation, for example, even if some regulators take it too far. A world without plastics (made from oil) is inconceivable to younger generations. The more we can recycle plastics, metals, and other materials that don’t naturally regenerate within a human lifetime, the better.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually becomes economically feasible to artificially generate such resources on a massive scale apart from drilling and mining. Maybe it won’t happen in my lifetime. But it’s just heat, pressure, and atomic Chess.
Recycling is a huge lie.
Yep. Great quote Seawriter!
Well, I’d like to split the difference. Recycling just about everything except metals is a huge lie. It consumes more energy than starting from scratch.
Depends. If it makes economic sense to recycle some material it should be done, and, in a free market it will be recycled by the producers of said material.
And asphalt and concrete, although in a different way for each.
I suspect that when the market drops for a recycled item that it is dumped into a landfill with the rest of the garbage. When the price of copper drops on occasion they close mines in Arizona until the price starts climbing again and then they reopen the mines.
For those of you who may not know where this comes from:
WHEN 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail.
What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.
“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”
Another said: “I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.” Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: “Sod off, Swampy.”
From https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/10/09/occupy-london-stock-exchange/#21d227c222b0
Even most metals are not worth doing. Structural steel and cars work.
If, in a free market, it pays to recycle cans, then recyclers will pay for them. When government has to subsidize it, then recycling does not pay, and is a crock.
Not quite, it is just not the holy grail that it is presented to be. That and some of the processes needed to recycle are very nasty, much more dangerous and hazardous than virgin material processes.
Are there cases where the ”greater good” apply, thus justifying subsidies?
Back when I was a kid, we would collect aluminum cans and newspaper to recycle. We got very little for the amount of effort, but it wasn’t nothing and it fluctuated. Were the recycling places paid to pay us?
Not really. Greater good appeals are generally guilt trips. Recycling anything but metals consumes more energy and resources than they save. Plastic is made from carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. Maybe one or two other elements, but we are talking about stuff easily found in the atmosphere and the seas.
Depends. Not in the 1980s or earlier. Starting in the 1990s the commercial recycling places went under because they could not compete with government-subsidized recycling. There was a place in Palestine, TX that paid for aluminum cans, but it went under by the time I moved out (2001).
Aluminum and steel were worth recycling (and still are). Newspaper not so much. By now I would bet the most economical use of newspaper would be to use it as boiler fuel rather than recycling wood pulp. Wood for paper is farmed.
Seawriter
I’m pretty sure you can get paid for aluminum, it’s just that most people don’t bother (you have to deliver it to the recycling plant). If I recall correctly, it’s very energy costly to process aluminum from ore.
I’ve participated in school fundraisers that collect can tabs. There’s more aluminum concentrated there or some other such something. All I know is that we had tabs galore, and the elementary school said “keep ’em coming.”
My best friend and I used to go out and collect cans and bottles to make some dough. It wouldn’t have been a lot to anyone who had to put gas in a car, but it made us big enough fortunes to go to an occasional matinee on our own well-earned dimes and buy popcorn and pop, which was pretty glorious.
Umm . . . no. It’s more a case of an urban myth becoming kind-of, sort-of true because some corporations find it better PR to play along. What I find fascinating is teachers seem to buy into it (and cannot be convinced there is nothing intrinsically valuable about can tabs) more than any other group.
At any rate, I cannot sway true believers on this one. They believe there must be a pony in there somewhere.
Seawriter
Oh! That’s interesting.
I never “bought into” anything apart from reading the flyer sent home by the school, putting a bowl on the table, collecting pop tabs in that bowl, emptying the bowl when it was full, and then sending my munchkin off to school clutching that collection in a freezer bag to turn into his teacher.
Repeat the process with the next flyer.
I mean, I figured the people sending home the flyers did something with the pop tabs they kept requesting, right?
Exactly. Aluminum ore is abundant, but the refining of it is costly compared to the cost of recycling it.
P.J. O’Rourke is awesome. P.J. has written several articles for Car and Driver over the decades, and has a compilation book of his auto-related articles. I highly recommend it. I don’t recall if that quote is in this book, but it’s likely.
I should have been clearer. The teachers that buy in seem to be elementary teachers. And some of them have been pod-person like insisting it must be true. Like I said, a few corporations have been bludgeoned into accepting them at higher than intrinsic value because customers so want this to be true. They write off the difference in their charitable contributions for the year.
Seawriter
I always figured it was just a token of “this is how willing we are to do this thing” rather than something that actually produced value.
Which is to say, when they had us do that sort of thing there was nothing explained about the environment, rather “if you collect this many, we get a new slide for the playground” or whoever collects the most gets a prize. At least to the best of my recollection, although I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the only part that registered.
Gee. Kinda fits what I said about greater good arguments in comment 21. Virtue signalling.
Seawriter