Here in Portland, we love the environment. We care about the environment and we care for the environment. We like to do things for the environment. Well, mostly, what we like best to do for the environment is tell other people what they should not be doing. There's no end to the solutions we have, all of which have several features in common: (1) All technology must be older technology, (2) people must stop doing whatever makes them happy and start being happy little collectivists, (3) guilt, (4) junk science.
You know. Self-righteously dull.
Two thirds of all the chatter from the green weenies is envy and the other two-thirds is posturing in an attempt to get some notice from other green weenies. (I know the arithmetic doesn't work out, but you know what I mean.)
Portland's environmental sophisticates will smugly ride a bike eight miles to work and back, and then drive a flaming huge 4wd SUV fourteen miles worth of trips to various specialty markets to fix dinner each night. The SUV is necessary because on weekends they must drive said FH 4wd SUV up Mt. Hood so as to slide repeatedly down the mountain with implements (of which a large component part came from oil wells) strapped to their feet. This past winter about the best thing that happened to the environment around here, when it comes to air pollution and energy and resource depletion, was that it hasn't snowed much on the mountain.
It isn't that being concerned about the environment is a bad thing. Quite the contrary. It's that so many of those who constantly just go on about it, are so parochial and -- fundamentally unserious.
We are not going to solve environmental problems by going back to a simpler, less technologically- demanding life. Life was never simpler. Just shorter. We need to look at where we are -- right now -- and look at the resources we have -- right now. There are rational approaches to the problem, as here, by Varifrank. And then there are the green weenies all around me.
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