Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

This could be considered another belated Birthday/Earth Day special as I originally intended to write it for release the weekend after the 22nd of April retelling a little bit of a narrative in a previous article about sharing the day with the first soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and mocking Earth Hour by turning on all my porch lights and every other light in my house. However I was awfully busy that day doing something and just let it go.

Maybe next year—if there is a next year I’ll have time for such cheep stunts which can be fun and to tell the truth ; having the luxury to engage in conspicuous consumption to thumb our noses at those who want people (other than themselves) to take a vow of poverty for the sake of the planet—let alone for its own sake—is a good thing.

I’m speaking of being able to do something because you can—not taking a vow of poverty for the planet—or any altruistic progressive cause for that matter. To hell with that and anyone who would be foolish enough to embrace such a cut off your nose to spite your face suicide pact that has long been the hallmark of environmental extremism. For that’s where they’re going and we are dangerously close to being dragged along as a nation as so many of its advocates have managed to grab control of the levers of power in this time of crisis and so many people are blind to the danger.

I try to find humor in the insanity and hypocrisy.

Like a remark uttered many years ago by the recently departed Prince Philip who wished to be reincarnated as a deadly virus. A gaff hallmark of misanthropic environmental philosophy often embraced by the elite.

https://royalcentral.co.uk/uk/philip/prince-philips-deadly-virus-gaffe-139041/

With states gearing up to reopen while the virus rages again in India the verdict on Covid is still out. However there are things potentially more dangerous and that has dampened my enthusiasm to joke about the rampant insanity and hypocrisy of the political class. Mainly because of what happened earlier this week . An alleged cyberattack that shut down the Colonial Pipeline and caused gas shortages and lines in parts of the eastern seaboard reminiscent of the 1970s this week. And prices jumped quite a bit locally.

This took me by surprise as I was a not preoccupied with the effort to connect all my rain barrels around the greenhouse with bulkheads this week and was not paying attention to current events until Ray up in Wisconsin said something about it the day before I went back to work on Wednesday. Luckily there were no lines and I was able to get gas because the gauge hit empty the day before when I was making a run to the hardware store for some pipe fittings.

YIKES!

This brought back a lot of memories of childhood and adolescence when we had the “Energy Crisis” and I find myself hoping and praying that it doesn’t get any worse than those days. In some ways it seems even worse because at least Jimmy Carter was not on a crusade to literally shut down the existing energy production and distribution infrastructure and replace it with what I’ve come to call Inadequate Technology. Which is my pun on the slogan of radical environmentalists back in the day to lambaste the vision of Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill—author of : The High Frontier. For those who are unfamiliar with the book ; it details a plan to colonize space and utilize the resources of the moon and nearby asteroids to build a network of huge solar collectors in geosynchronous orbit to beam power to earth based power grids and put an end to the energy crisis and reduction of dependence on Middle Eastern oil. And also the likelihood of that volatile region sparking a confrontation with the Russians and full scale thermonuclear war.

It also could actually replace nuclear and coal fired power plants and hydroelectric dams and have great environmental benefits and provided affordable energy and electrification of developing nations to reduce poverty and raise the baseline of humanity globally.

Of course there was the late Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire who screamed “Not a penny for this nutty fantasy” which was at its best an example of tragic myopia. But worst of all was the response of environmental activists who called it Inappropriate Technology on the grounds that it was big and centralized and out of scale with their vision of a decentralized small is beautiful solar democracy. A good reference to that can be found in Ben Bova’s The High Road which I intend on doing an in-depth book review on in the near future.

A decentralized solar democracy. Which was more or less a vision of a future of solar panels on individual homes and other soft technologies that give independence from a centralized infrastructure that is more or less the modern equivalent of hydraulic despotism. Doable if you are resourceful or affluent enough to hire someone to do it for you. However not so workable for cities and the urban poor.

There is an interesting scenario in Bova’s book that is now obsolete like many science fiction and futurist predictions often become a few decades into the actual future. Also Edward Tucker quoted a prominent member of the old guard Civil Rights movement in his book: “Progress & Privilege: America in the Age of Environmentalism” where environmentalists are lambasted as “bloody self righteous elitists” who promote policies that are detrimental to economic growth and impact negatively upon the interests of the Black community and the poor in general.

Inappropriate Technology?

It’s kind of ironic that they don’t even believe their original argument as now it’s all about Big Green and building bird killing cuisine-arts blighting the ridges of Greater Appalachia. And we have an administration in power that’s still bent on canceling pipelines without regard to two recent wake up calls—the power failures this past winter in Texas caused by the wind turbines freezing up and now last week’s disruption of the Colonial Pipeline. Imagine stuff like that happening more often. Multiple incidents at the same time. In the midst of a brutally cold winter. That spells LETHAL. Worse than a virus. And it would make it impossible to deal with something like a pandemic let alone stopping an incoming asteroid.

The foolishness and inconsistency of the Biden Administration boggles the mind of anyone who is grounded in a working knowledge of the universe. They are encouraging millions of refugees to enter the country and swamp the resources of the immigration system during a global pandemic. Canceled the Keystone Pipeline and thousands of jobs and compounded the hardship of many more people in this time of great uncertainty—not to mention undermining national security by making the nation more dependent again on Middle East oil. Also the greater likelihood of war. Guess they need something else to keep the world in a state of turmoil after Covid runs its course. And the insistence on dismantling the existing energy infrastructure before they actually have a workable technology with sufficient lifting power to take its place. Talk about major disasterville. It doesn’t get more inappropriate than that.

On the other hand who knows what this ship of fools will do next.

 

End Notes

Wish I had been more upbeat. I should have talked more about Solar Power Satellites and O’Neill cylinders. Maybe in a future article. Those things are still on the table. And maybe Elon Musk will be the one to get it done.

Or at least get it started.

He’s going to need that kind of infrastructure if he’s really serious about colonizing and terraforming Mars.

Later

On my way to see Uncle Budd at the care facility which has opened up again I noticed gas prices have crept up a little more. Guess it will keep doing that with every Middle Eastern crisis or policy change until the economy tanks again like it did in 2008 when it hit $4.

Further down the road to the facility was this sign posted by someone who apparently doesn’t like PA Green New Deal Tom Wolf. I think we get a chance to give him the boot soon!