Here is a strangely sanguine
article from American Thinker about microwave technology that could improve even on fracking production from shale formations. The author believes even environmentalists will like it, because it uses less water than fracking. I predict it won't be more than a few weeks before we start seeing articles complaining that microwaves trapped in the rock will produce earthquakes, autism, heteronormative bathrooms, and income inequality in affected counties.
It'll also cause brain cancer in snail darters and beluga sturgeons (and by the way microwave radiation accumulates in fish bodies, beluga caviar will contribute to liver cancer in humans), and because of the way rock formations serve as antennae and focus leaking microwave radiation, it'll melt the Arctic ice cap and drown all the polar bears.
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
More fundamentally, the environmentalists (at the leadership level, at least) simply don't want any further fossil fuel development, period. Opposition to the particulars of any given practice or development is just part of a "death by a thousand cuts" strategy.
ReplyDelete"More fundamentally, the environmentalists (at the leadership level, at least) simply don't want any further fossil fuel development, period."
ReplyDeleteMany of them also don't like traditional hydropower, either. (Hydropower, if you think about it, is really solar power with a nice integral storage feature)
The change in the attitude toward dams and power stations is one interesting market of the difference between the old Left and today's Left. See my post Frankly, My Dear, I Do Need a Dam:
http://photoncourier.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html#116170691210214436
@ David Foster - I'd forgotten Photon Courier!
ReplyDeleteMy sense (and I admit that's not a scientific statement) is that environmentalists started out disliking petroleum because it was dirty and the guys who worked with it and understood cars didn't seem as cool. Bad haircuts, wrong music and all that. Secondly, their expectation of how the world should be is over-influenced by how things look, emphasis on summer-camp. This includes even things that are far away and known only in photographs - logging 100 miles into the forest or building a pipeline terminal on a tundra. They aren't ever going to see them, the environmental impact is negligible, but they care about how these things look rather than fresh water aquifers or other actually important environmental things.
A lot of environmentalism is more of an aesthetic: individual cars and lots of concrete bother them. Trains just seem cooler.
and hermaphroditism too. Don't forget it causes hermaphroditism very important that one.
ReplyDelete:)
-Mississippi
and the environmentalists want you to get sterilized so you and your kin leave no carbon footprints....i
ReplyDeleteits for posterity ya know..... just not your posterity.
- Mississippi
Heh.
ReplyDeleteBut if it does cause hermaphrodism, doesn't that mitigate against the gender normative bathrooms?
(I saw a photo once of a forested mountain range, with the text: "Oh, look! A gender-neutral bathroom!")