The greens I run across aren’t the most coherent crowd. I find a strong differnce between people who are ecologically friendly, and those who identify themselves with the green political movement. I support ecological planning and awareness, and I like the idea of taking the long view. I don’t know any green types who actually do either.
Much of my ire centered around the way environmental politics is played around where my parents live. There is always some idiot from somewhere else bitching about the environmental impact of the cattle farms, fighting any new industries moving into the area, and in the next sentence complaining about the price of beef. Seems to be the same group who wants to shorten the hunting season, and bitches about the deer eating their flowers and destroying their (non-native) trees. The same attitudes are at play locally with Cape Wind, and expanding the T. You can’t do that, it’ll impact the environment.
Which, as you say is nimbyism. Which I associate with the greenies. The useful preservative and restorative work I associate more with conservationists, hunters and farmers, who are interested in the long term human use of the environment. I’ve never met a greeny who is interested in the economic or social impact of environmental policy, just twits who think that using the land is bad and asses who cloak their nimby motives with a sheen of environmentalism.
To me, the greenies are the assholes who promote earth day, and celebrate both obstructionist policy and unshowered, self-rightous twits. It doesn’t seem to have an actual enviromental purpose. OTOH, arbor day promotes actually doing something useful in the environment, and you’re expected to take a shower after planting your trees.
There aren’t a lot of fun “cause and effect” things you can do at a plant, since everything is hidden. You could let them sootblow…but that’s sort of boring unless you have a camera on the blower itself. In fact, the reason I don’t take kids to plants any more* is that it’s too damn boring for them. Due to “security” and “safety” regulations (mostly made-up CYA ones) the kids sometimes come in, go to a lecture in the break room or a meeting room, get some colour handouts, and leave. They won’t even let them on the freaking turbine deck for crying out loud! I asked last time if we could give them each a piece of coal in a Zip-Loc bag, and the teacher objected, saying that the coal was “flammable” and therefore “prohibited” under their “zero-tolerance policy against having flammable items in the school”. I thought I was going to have a stroke keeping from screaming.
I’d love to take kids to a coal plant that co-fires biomass…except there are none nearby.
SW Oklahoma? I wasn’t aware of any coal plants there…SE maybe (Hugo).
I don’t take college Engineering students to plants any more because I got tired of them chatting me up about work while trying to hand me their resumes.
Wow. You can’t even give out a lump of coal anymore?? Someone should alert Santa Claus. Paper is pretty flammable too. Kids should probably leave those dangerous textbooks and spiral notebooks at home.
I am in SW Oklahoma at our headquarters but the plant in Hugo is ours.
Well the greens you see are a lot different from the greens I actually work with on a regular basis. I do not know what causes this disconnect, are your greens college kids? The ones I deal with are mostly 30+ and leaning towards the plus.
The older greens are nearly unbending on nuclear. Nuke is still the bogey man, but they are all for cleaning up coal, building wind farms everywhere & building solar everywhere. They collectively push for greener policies but also acknowledge the only way to stop global warming is to get businesses on board and that we the greens must work with the corporations.
I also have not run into the unwashed except at the Clearwater Revival and a few other fests. Even there, they are the minority.
The ones I deal with are either second career types, or the 30 and under crowd, but I think the difference is more to do with urban/rural. Most of the older greens I encounter are ones out by my parents in the upper midwest, people who’ve moved out to the country, and expect the hicks to be overawed with their wisdom, and the farms not to stink. The younger ones are more nimbys trying to keep the planes and trains at bay. The environmentalists I know try to distance themselves from the greens, mostly to avoid politicizing the issue any more than they have to.
The anti-nuke crowd simply seems to be a bunch of easily frightend people. Like the nimby crowd, I see them as using the green movement by cloaking their fear in environmental terms.
To be honest, the unwashed are rather rare, it’s just that the ones I have encountered have left a distinct impression. It doesn’t help anyone that they’re the loudest and most annoyingly self-righteous as well as the smelliest.
Now I get it. We are using green in two different ways. I am using it to indicated people that are part of environmental groups in general. That is a little lazy on my part. You are using it as people that self-identify as greens and not just environmentalists in general. When I say green, I am using it as a short cut for environmentalists.
As to the nuke issue, if you talk to the environmentalists that are anti-nuke, it is not just fear. It is more of a deep seated “Old School Liberal” distrust of Big Business and the Government doing what is right over what is profitable. I don’t agree with them, but I understand their point of view.
My first meeting with the group I am active in ended up in a debate with two of the members over how the Navy being nuclear was actually better than running oil burners. I did not convince them, but over the years, they have at least come to realize that not all pro-nuke power people are evil ogres or shills for energy companies. This is quite a concession for people that really were hippies back in the day.
But do they call themselves hippies? Do people stand up and say, “I’m a hippie?” The term went out about 25 years ago, if not longer. Are they still hanging out in Haight-Ashbury? I attended Uni of Iowa for a bit–time was when it was a hotbed of 60s hippies. In 1980, not so much… Peace out, man.
I am sure many, if not most of them bathe–I was responding to other posts that referred to them as hairy and unwashed.
I live in West Virginia. Earth Day is when the local brainless idiots get on television to stand up and scream how “them left wing, baby eatin’, freedom-takin’ idiots” are going to destroy our economy by trying to do something about the amount of coal the US uses.
[major eyeroll]
Me and Hubby are trying to be more green around the house and barn. We already compost our horse and bunny manure [hey, two small bunnies can make a LOT of poo!!], along with any hay that goes bad. We’re also switching all of the lights that we can to CFL’s, and are recycling the bags that our horse’s feed comes in.
I believe his family fortune is from many resources, but ultimately, the Bin Laden family money is there as huge profits from oil revenue*. Besides it won’t matter any more, even if we became 100% self sufficient, oil demand is not going to drop much in the foreseeable future.
Construction in Saudi was ‘fueled’ by the oil profits, so to me it is still oil money.
I’m not quite that bad, but I do hate hippies and greenies and I do tend to avoid buying “Yay! Organic” stuff because I really don’t want to give my money to anything that promotes Lefty Tree Hugging.
Fortunately, Earth Day here was non-existent as far as I was concerned, and I’m glad of that. The way I see it, the planet is big enough and old enough to look after itself for the most part, and whilst we shouldn’t go around randomly burning down rainforests or organising Panda hunting expeditions, I don’t think we should be going out of our way to fuck around with any of this “Carbon Neutrality” or any even tangentially related touchy-feely bullshit, either.
I did my bit for Earth Day by making more of it. More earth, that is. At least it will be earth, once it biodegrades and all, so you could say I’m thinking about future generations. Yep, some day a child will look at a bit of dirt or a tree or a dead rat or something and think, “Man, a few scant years ago that used to be Scissorjack’s morning turd”. And that’s what Earth Day means to me: an erstwhile turd.
Well the planet will come through this current problem fine, it is the current residents the people in and out of the various environmnetal movements are worried about. By residents I mean both the humans and the wildlife of course.
Are you discounting the concept of AGW across the board? Do you think there is actually a downside to cleaning up emissions from transport, travel and power generation?
Basically. I think most of it is over-hyped, blown out of proportion scaremongering, and I refuse to change any of my current habits because of it.
Depends how it’s done. Not per se, no- but if the replacements are going to be considerably more expensive than whatever they’re replacing, then I think we need to ask ourselves “Is this necessary, or is it lefty PR-mongering?”. Obviously that’s a no-brainer if we’re dealing with something spewing huge quantities of visible pollutants into the air (like a chemical factory), but not so much for things like “Carbon Neutral” tarriffs on electricity, airline tickets, etc.
Remember, folks: There’s a billion Chinese and a billion Indians that aren’t having a bar of all this Tree-Huggery… you can recycle and buy organic and so on as much as you like, ultimately it won’t make any difference in the end.
Happily you are wrong on the last part, if the West does the job of creating the newer cleaner technologies for coal plants, cars, wind, solar and even air travel, then the Indians and Chinese can follow our lead and selfishly clean their own air and in doing so help the entire world.
I hope you are correct that AGW is wrong, but with the reading I have done, I strongly believe you are wrong.
It doesn’t have to be both. I’m entirely unconvinced of AGW, stress on the A there, but I don’t think there are too many downsides to reasonable measures to improve the environment. I recycle: because recycling is cheaper, we don’t have to pay for recycling, but do trash, and landfills are ugly. I reuse shopping bags: because I hate the clutter of 1,000 plastic bags a year (this is recent, before I recycled the plastic bags). I think we should reduce air pollution: if we do, fewer people, myself included, will suffer from asthma and they think it worsens allergies too. I think we should have high mpg standards: it’s wrong that car manufacturers (and especially those of light trucks and SUVs) are allowed to take advantage of far too low CAFE standards and cause us to use more of expensive, finite resources. And I think we should reduce water pollution too: there would be fewer people sick, which saves on medical care, and aren’t fish kind of neat, if they’re not dead? … Self interest can go far towards acting in a more “green” manner and supporting some of the goals despite not buying the philosophies.
Agreed and an excellent post. I personally find the reports on AGW to be compelling, but long before I became I aware of them, I practiced many things that were green. Recycling is easy as is saving electric and water. Mulching and composting is much easier than bagging grass and leaves.
I grew up seeing the Passaic River on fire and floating feces washing down for NYC to the Beaches of NJ. As a young adult in the Navy, I saw and smelled how nasty the river at Subic Bay in the Philippines was. It was easy to work for clean water or Clearwater if you will.
