I don’t know whether the author is over-writing this piece or whether I’m just tired, but I’m finding this slightly dense reading. The gist, however, is that environmentalists apparently are having trouble expanding their vision beyond a fairly narrow focus:
…the recent focus of energy thinking has been particularly concentrated on the ways and means of reducing carbon emissions and, linked with that, cutting down energy use, rather than taking energy use as essential for conquering poverty and seeing the environmental challenge within a more comprehensive understanding. There would appear to be an insufficient recognition in global discussion of the need for increased power in the poorer countries. In India, for example, about a third of the people do not have any power connection at all. Making it easier to produce energy with better environmental correlates (and greater efficiency of energy use) may be a contribution not just to environmental planning, but also to making it possible for a great many deprived people to lead a fuller and freer life.
The problem here is this: The New Republic has made the mistake – and many, many people make this mistake – as treating hardcore environmentalists as anything except devout religious believers. Frankly, most Greenies don’t care if India has an awful power distribution grid. If they cared they’d do something about it.
The rest of the article? …Ehh. I’m going to be charitable and assume that I’m just too tired to wade through the text without assistance. Although I wonder whether the author has ever thought to analyze his own, rather subjective and possibly even theological, thoughts on nuclear power…
Via Memeorandum.
Moe Lane
PS: If I have learned anything, it’s this: when you see that somebody has a problem, yet hasn’t implemented what seems to you to be the most obvious solution to that problem, take another look at the situation. There’s usually a reason why they haven’t done so yet. If the developing world hasn’t adopted solar power en masse yet, it behooves people to ask why…
They care that India has an awful power distribution grid alright. They just care about keeping it awful and they wish they could make ours just as awful. 🙂
Yeah, this seems more likely. If everyone had a crappy grid, there’s be fewer people, and that would just make these loons happier.
Although I really do wonder how far they’ve thought about this–are they willing to do without all the trappings of modern technological society?
Well, THEY are not.
However, as long as us knuckle draggers out here in flyover country are reduced to poverty, they will sleep well at night.
They’re going to find out they can’t have one but not the other.
Of course they aren’t “willing to do without the trappings of modern technological society”– they are the “enlightened elite”, and those trappings are the price the unwashed masses have to pay them to gain the benefits of their enlightenment.
I would swear I had replied to 1_Rick…. D:
Moe- “slightly dense reading” is a very kind description of this article. I was wide awake and interested in the topic and couldn’t make it through.
Curiously, most of the rabid, non-thinking, doctrinaire greenies I encounter “in the wild” would, if they were pushing tea, cookies, and Jesus, be right at home in circa-1950s methodist services… They’re universally older, not terriby quick thinkers, and unless you drift crosswise of their religion, generally genial.
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The remainder are young and stupid, both states which are self-curing.
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Mew