From the by M.D. Fletcher |
April 2010 |
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Everything is cyclical. I remember back in the 1970's, Time magazine ran an end-of-the-world style cover on global cooling and how the next ice age was surely on its way. The Great Lakes were going to freeze up harder than a banker's heart and Miami, Florida was going to be the next Fargo, North Dakota. About the same time the economy was circling the drain and Jimmy Carter was unscrewing every other light bulb in the White House. We had, the experts proclaimed, plumb run out of natural gas and the Arabs were sticking it to us at the pump to the tune of a buck a gallon. Wannabe Fascist Commie hybrids in Cuba and Venezuela were taking over the southern American hemisphere and our school system was turning out kids so stupid McDonalds had to put pictures of burgers on their cash registers so the little blockheads could make a sale. Detroit started making some of the ugliest and wimpiest cars in the history of automotive engineering. The government launched a huge program to install weather-stripping in every home, business, hogan, teepee and wikiup in the country. Billions were spent, millions were stolen and all the while politicians were mostly preoccupied with skinny-dipping in the Capital reflecting pool with hookers supposedly employed as congressional aids. The electric utility industry was forbidden from firing a steam turbine with natural gas so billions of dollars of rate-payers money was invested in coal mines, coal trains and coal fired generating stations. Pollution control devices like scrubbers and static precipitators added another third to the cost of the generating facilities, all in accordance with the increasingly stringent requirements of an Environmental Protection Agency essentially driven by the ever-increasingly strident demands of the Sierra Club and others. Electric transmission lines capable of moving enormous amounts of power and energy were strung across the western United States in order to match generation with demand. Mountaintops served as sites for microwave and radio components designed to provide system operators the communication ability necessary for the command and control of the vast, interconnected power infrastructure. |
Forty years later, Time magazine is running end-of-the-world style covers on global warming and how the polar ice caps are soon to be a thing of the past. Montreal is now the next Miami and Miami is now an underwater theme park. All of the world's coastal areas are inundated with the every-encroaching sea and the sea itself is devoid of life due to thermally triggered oxygen deprivation. Deforestation and desertization processes have crippled the food production cycles and mankind is now starving under a relentless and unforgiving sun. Wowser. I guess if you buy all that you shouldn't make any long-term plans. Perhaps we should all remember that Time magazine is in the business of selling Time magazines, just as Al Gore is in the business of selling Chicken Little nonsense to the environmental community and Al Sharpton is in the business of selling racial hatred and hypocrisy to anyone who will listen. The fact is, though, there are some similarities between then and now. The Arabs are still sticking it to us at the pump to the tune of now 3 bucks a gallon. South American dictators in Cuba and Venezuela are still thrashing about trying to justify the misery they've brought upon their people and our school systems, incredibly, are now turning out kids too stupid to even understand the burger pictures on the cash register. The government has now launched a huge program to install a solar system on every home, business, hogan, teepee and wikiup in the country. Billions are being spent, millions are being stolen and politicians are still having problems keeping their pants on. Natural gas is now miraculously abundant and coal is demonized as a somehow credible threat to civilization as we know it. Although the economy and particularly unemployment is currently in worse shape that it was in the 1970's, the government continues to believe the doubling or tripling of the cost of energy is the solution to all our perceived problems. What goes around, comes around. Everything is cyclical. Wait .... I think this is where I came in. |
