Sorry, a late post today. Lex is still recovering from travel from the left coast yesterday. Except for the traffic, crowds and even loonier billboards, California - or as the Govinator calls it Culleeforneea - is pretty much as I left it in 1992. The weather, scenes and people are all beautiful.
I heard a radio station urging people to discard their old incandescent light bulbs for energy efficient neon ones. The ad made no mention of the dangerous mercury content in neon light bulbs or how one should go about disposing of them in an environmentally sound way.
So I thought, that will be the next big environmental disaster. Tens of millions of people will switch to neon lights – very few of which are produced in the US by the way. Over the next couple of decades these lights will be discarded in the usual haphazard manner. Then the same eco kooks urging us to use these things will be complaining because the Chinese have created an inferior bulb that will not burn as long and has 80 times the mercury content. Then the large scale use and disposal of those bulbs will have mercury seeping into our ground water.
Then there were the enviro cars. These came in two varieties. First were the hybrids which can run on fuel which charges a battery which when convenient is used to power the car instead of gasoline. The others were “flex fuel” cars which I suppose used the famous (if you’re a farmer) or infamous (if you have to buy your milk from the grocery) E85 ethanol. The two had one thing in common, each had some sticker from the manufacturer declaring the auto eco friendly. It reminded me of drivers vain enough to put one of those “My child is honor student at the Dim Wit Academy” stickers on their bumper.
My first thought when I saw one was, what dopey looking car. The next thought was, it’ll never take a checkered flag at Talladega in a Nextel race. Then there was the concern about millions upon millions of worn out hybrid batteries. What do we do with all of those? And when you have to replace the batteries every 3-4 years any money in fuel savings will probably be out the window. You’ll have to pay for new batteries and disposal of the old ones. Then all of the battery acid, lead and plastic contained in each battery is sure to create a new eco disaster in and of itself.
Then there’s the whole ethanol thing. Mark Steyn has written that we will go down as the dumbest people in the history of the planet for burning food in our autos. Yes while people are starving, environmental whackos think it’s a good thing that food should cost more and more so that they can pay 4 times what a car should cost because it burns food instead of oil. Oh yeah, and so they can sit in an LA traffic jam with one of those terribly clever “I’m better than you because I drive an eco friendly car” stickers on their uglyass auto. When milk gets to be $6 a gallon, I predict having an identifier on your car that indicates it burns E85 is more likely to get you the finger than praise from your fellow drivers. God must be looking down shaking His head thinking, I’ve given them everything they need, but they refuse to use it for the purpose for which it was created.
Don’t even get me started on nuclear.
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