Greens vs. Greens UPDATED—AGAIN!

 

First, I can’t give one good reason why I haven’t posted for so long.  I’ve been commenting away on various websites, but for whatever reason, nothing here.  Whatevs, I will try to get back to it here.

So, I’m reading around this morning and I come across this article about Senator Dianne Feinstein blocking construction on a solar farm in the Mojave Desert.  She has blocked the solar farms, a decidedly green initiative, because an environmental group acquired and then donated the land for the express purpose of keeping it undeveloped.  So, the enviros spent $45 million in donated funds and another $18 million of federal money, aka, our money, to acquire the land and then donated it to the federal government.  WTF?  The enviros want us to save land, reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, eat less meat, blah, blah, blah.  But they won’t allow someone to build a solar farm in the Mojave-frakkin’ desert?  I’m just guessing here, but the desert might be a good place to harvest sun fruit.

The Left in general and the Greens in particular have tied themselves into a giant circular jerk whenever anybody wants to do something.  Inevitably, they violate one of their umpteen rules, to the point that nothing happens.  When something like this happens, they should be required to contribute electricity back into the grid in some fashion to offset the loss they cause.

UPDATE:  More redonkulosity here:  The greenest way to make a holiday fire.  Pure navel gazing.  Just burn some damn wood.

More Updates:  It just keeps getting more redonkulous all the time.  I’m guessing Al Gore and the rest of them didn’t stop to think that a commodity market works both ways.  From the Financial Times:

“Prices for carbon permits for December 2010 delivery, the benchmark contract for pricing European permits, dropped nearly 10 per cent in early trading, before recovering to end the day 8.3 per cent lower at €12.41.

Lower prices give companies less incentive to invest in cutting their greenhouse gas output. Analysts estimate that prices of more than €40 a tonne are required to stimulate investment in new low-carbon technologies.”

If €40 a tonne is what is needed to stimulate investment and carbon credits are currently trading at €12.41, then there is a long ways to go to get to where the greenies have to go.  Which raises a question that has always bothered me about cap and trade and that is the cap.  There is really only one way to drive that price up and that is for the underlying value of the credits to increase.  That can be done by either a) everybody out there generating so much carbon output that they have to mitigate their output by buying credits or, more problematically to me b) reducing the cap by fiat.  Because that is what is going to happen if this system gets implemented.  Every year, some bureaucratic body, under political pressure, will sit down and decide that the cap needs to come down by, say, 10%.  Only it may not be technologically feasible to do so, which will not alter the decision of an ideologue one bit.  And it is ideologues that will be making these decisions.  In keeping with the likelihood of unintended consequences that is my theme here, those ideologues won’t always be greenies.

And then there is this:  Pets may be worse for the environment than SUVs.  This just kills me!  I have spent a good bit of time in parts of Atlanta that are, shall we say, leftist.  These areas are overrun with pets.  My own two sisters, both of whom are to the left of center, have 5 dogs and 2 cats between them and they both drive SUVs.  One of them lives in a house that is much too big for the number of people who live there.  They frequently put their dogs in their SUVs and drive them places.  In the interest of family relations, we no longer discuss these issues, but once I pointed this out to one of my sisters, the leftier of the two, who drives an SUV.  Her reply was that it was a Low Emission Vehicle.  Then I pointed out that it didn’t matter because it still carried a big carbon load due to its manufacturing and the fact that, low emissions or not, it still burns gas.  And that was about the last time that we talked about this stuff.  I don’t begrudge either of them their homes and pets, I just wished that they would either live up to their so-called beliefs or stop conveniently overlooking their own transgressions.  Be honest about it.  I wonder if Ed Begley, Jr. has pets?  Hell, he probably feeds his dog broccoli.