Tuesday, February 19, 2008

21st Century Welfare Chiselers



If you listen to the Demo candidates they're going to end the energy dominance of the detested villains of Big Oil and are about to embark on a whole new era of Green Energy which will create millions of Green Collar jobs. Oh the Age Of Aquarius! We've been kept from it for too damned long by the Horrible Bushy Years. We're over in the Middle East murdering Iraqi babies so that Big Oil can extract more of its ill-gotten gains.
Sigh.
Of course, we already are spending tens of billions to subsidize corn-based ethanol. Because harvesting the raw material, distilling it into ethanol , transporting it by truck (ethanol is not transportable by pipeline) and blending it with petroleum-based gasoline (pure ethanol is not a substitute for gasoline, it is an additive) uses more energy than you get when you burn the ethanol this Green technology is of questionable use in the drive to replace petroleum. Another side effect of this giant government-sponsored boondoggle is the huge increase in acreage devoted to corn production. The prairie dogs had better watch out. Their role in our Green Tomorrow is problematic. So to save the polar bears of ANWAR from a couple of dozen oil rigs we're plowing under the Great Plains so we can hand big subsidy checks to Agribusiness. If this is like every other farm subsidy program we can predict with confidence the insane waste and fraud that is taking place. Already we've seen corn prices in poor countries skyrocket because of this nonsense, adding to world hunger and illegal immigration.
But all our Green Eggs (no Ham PLEASE! We're Vegans!) arent in one basket. Anybody who has driven into the outback of California has seen burgeoning forests of windmills. Also heavily subsidized by the State and the Feds these giant whirling pinwheels are, in addition to being a monstrously ugly blight on the landscape, pureeing tens of thousands of birds while they spin away. One nuclear power plant would replace ten or twenty times the number of these monster windmills that exist now but somehow nuclear power has not been given the Green Seal Of Approval. No reasonable solution is. These eco- idiots are nihilists. They see human society as evil, hence their solutions are aimed at de-technologizing our lives.
My favorite new Green Technology is Solar Power. The same people who, fifteen years ago wanted to close vast swathes of desert to any kind of human activity to save the imperiled desert tortoise are now advocating carpeting the desert with acre upon acre of solar panels, obviously to the detriment of the slow-moving reptiles that evoked such ardent concern a few years ago. No one has figured out how to divert part of the giant flood of Federal Lucky Bucks to a couple thousand square miles of solar panels but wait for the New Era Of Hope to dawn. There will be crowds of unemployed who will be eager to join a Federal make-work program that will carpet the desert with these inefficient energy collectors.
So now we have a giant and expanding welfare program for Eco-Chiselers and whoever wins this election has committed themselves (in this coldest winter in fifteen years) to combating Global Warming in the only way politicians know...give money to their friends and constituents. This is how a great country falls into ruin.

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