Wall street journal article:

[Ripsnort]

 

It's Not So Green in the Dark
The lights go out in California. Armchair environmentalists had it coming.

BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Thursday, February 8, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST

Well, boo hoo hoo. That's the most sympathy I can muster for all those
Californians currently tripping over their espresso makers in the dark. For
once we have some justice. Very bad decisions mean very cold hot tubs.

I'm not talking here about deregulation (though the bureaucrats sure
botched the job). I'm talking about supporting extreme environmentalism.

California is home to any number of earth-saving groups. More to the point,
it's home to an inordinate number of people who fund them. From the Napa
Valley to the Imperial, middle-class, left-leaning types have stumped up
quite a bit of booty for "good environmental causes." Californians consider
themselves some of nature's best friends.

But now these armchair environmentalists are faced with a big decision. A
decade's worth of ill-advised programs are starting to cramp their cushy
lifestyles. California enacted some of the strictest environmental rules in
the world and refused to build any new dam or plant. Now, with supply low
and prices high, the state is flailing. And so the armchair crowd must
decide: Will they support radical environmentalism or pragmatic
conservation?

Armchair environmentalists are very much a product of our times. They're
the people who say we mustn't cut down trees or drill in the tundra, but then
drag their children through Yellowstone in a gas-guzzling SUV and start
campfires on the side of the road. They sit in their four-bedroom houses,
on nice one-acre plots at the edge of town, and fret about urban sprawl. They
own energy-sucking computers and televisions, but adamantly oppose new
hydroelectric dams. Once a year, perhaps twice, they sit down and write fat
checks to the Sierra Club or Greenpeace. And they feel very good about
themselves. There are a lot of these folks. They qualify for the "armchair" label,
because they actually know very little about the environment. They don't
really need to, because their mission isn't really to do right by the
planet but to ease their own guilt over the good economic times. And so they
lazily support causes that sound good: affirmative action, campaign finance and .
nature.

Armchair environmentalists have done little to follow up on their
environmental investments. The groups they funded sallied forth to
Washington during the 1990s, and, finding an all-too-willing Clinton
administration, became shrill and extreme in their demands. Reasonable
suggestions for preservation gave way to backroom deals on animal research,
severe restrictions on logging, and ill-considered decisions to stop
building fire roads in millions of acres of forest land.

And hey presto, look what the armchair dwellers got. Their prized Western
vineyards are being shut down in deference to a supposedly endangered
salamander. Wealthy upstate New Yorkers have had their backyards turned
into protected wetlands. Snowmobiling, that favorite weekend treat of
hardworking executives, may be barred from national forests. Electricity prices are
soaring because no plants have been built. And with all those blackouts,
how are Californians supposed to charge up their electric cars?

Now the armchair crowd is whining: This wasn't what we meant!

California is an amusing lesson of cause and effect. It takes all those
worst-case scenarios that responsible conservationists have been warning
about for years and makes them reality. It shows, step by step, what
happens when pie-in-the-sky environmental policies--initiated by environmental
groups, paid for by armchair environmentalists and pushed through by
ambitious politicians--win out over a reasoned balance between humans and
nature.  California energy demands have risen 25% over the past eight years, while
the supply of new electricity has risen 6%. What makes for the difference?
Well, a coalition of environmental groups spent decades fighting the
building of the Auburn Dam, a hydroelectric facility with immense
electrical potential. The Rancho Seco nuclear reactor near Sacramento was shuttered
after environmental groups campaigned against it. Calpine Corp. has been
barred from building a plant in the Coyote Valley. Severe air pollution
regulations have kept plants from running at full capacity. The list goes
on. No major power plant has been built in California for 10 years, each
one stopped because of environmental protests.

A friend recently mourned the days when environmental groups gathered
like-minded people to appreciate nature and think of ways to care for it.
There still are some: Hunting organizations across the U.S. organize
cleanup days when members go out into the forest to pick up litter. Many private
charities use their money not for lobbying but for buying pieces of land at
market prices and then working hard to preserve the flora and fauna on
their plots.

But most of these grass-roots organizations have given way to radical
groups demanding heavy-handed government intervention. This is partly because the
people who funded them didn't bother to understand what they supported. It
was partly because younger idealists came to their helms. It was partly
because Eastern lawmakers, ignorant of the West and its needs and
practices, had these special interests to lunch and made them promises.

Either way, these groups no longer care about stimulating public interest
in the natural world. They have their own, fanatical views of how nature
should be managed and intend to make us live by their rules. The eco-terrorist who
has been burning down houses in Arizona because they obstructed his
mountain-biking views has been egged on by environmentalists of all
stripes.This shouldn't surprise us; it's the next logical step for people who
believe humans play second fiddle to trees.

George W. Bush has said when he leaves office he wants cleaner air and
water than when he arrived. But Mr. Bush and his interior secretary, Gale Norton,
realize the way to do this is through forward-looking ideas like market
environmentalism, an approach that holds that market incentives encourage
individuals to conserve resources and protect the environment. By putting
market values on our resources (like water for electricity, or land for
grazing rights) we as a nation can decide how much we are willing to pay
forour conservation, how much for other activities, and then make intelligent
tradeoffs.Of course, I could be wrong. If you're a Californian and you have ideas for
how to keep enjoying your plump lifestyle without exploiting natural
resources, by all means e-mail them to me. Oops, I forgot, you can't. You
don't have any power for your computer.

Ms. Strassel is an assistant features editor of The Wall Street Journal's
editorial page. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays

[Eagler]

Just the first step before the state cracks off and drops into the Pacific. Man, when that happens, the democrats will never win again without those 50 liberal electoral votes  

Eagler

[mrfish]

 

thats funny - serves us right - nancies!

though nuclear power porjects were completed after 3-mile island, no new plants were ordered. it got too expensive to idiot proof everything.

what these environmentalist dont realize is that you can recycle nuclear fuel rods for darn near ever - it is just more expensive so we dont do it we just bury them in pools all over the u.s.

what's the alternative - coal, gas, hydroelectric?

anyway - i guess you see where i'm going....more nuclear power plants!(and less homer simpsons runnin em!)

[TheWobble]

 

anyway - i guess you see where i'm going....more nuclear power plants!(and less homer simpsons runnin em!)

read my mind



[This message has been edited by TheWobble (edited 02-15-2001).]

[LJK Raubvogel]

Hell yeah, I grew up about 30 miles from Three Mile Island, and I turned out fine. The hair grew back and you can hardly notice the finger webbing.  

[AKDejaVu]

I was just wondering how long it would be befor several "warmed-down" nuclear power plants were brought back up.  We have on near Portland that was shut down 5 years ago (or thereabouts).  You may recognize it from the Simpsons... pond with blinky and all.  Matt Groenig was from the area

I also believe you will see a leap in the number of Windmills scattering the plateaus.  Now that deregulation has taken hold and a need has been established... cost isn't as much of an issue.  Afterall, its much easier to transfer the expense to the customers now.

AKDejaVu

[Ripsnort]

 

Originally posted by AKDejaVu:
You may recognize it from the Simpsons... pond with blinky and all.  Matt Groenig was from the area  
AKDejaVu

Alittle off-topic, but, do you know what the grocery scanner reads when the baby Simpson is scanned in the beginnning of the program?

It says NRA FOREVER...thats right, Mr. Groenig is a Republican...he must have felt out of his 'environment' down in Oregon, thus the funny stuff he protrays with Homer and his love for the hippy past...