Something I’d been
thinking about, and considering writing a blog post about, was nicely summed up
by Rich Daniels on Facebook:
Anti-smoking
activists remind me more and more of the AGW crowd. They have a principled goal
of saving lives/the planet. They posit a solution, don't smoke/don't emit so
much CO2. Then some smart arse comes along and solves these problems in such a
way as to give them their solutions without
really altering our lives, and they fucking hate it. We are doing what they
demanded without doing what they told us. The seething must be awful to behold.
So so true. Fracking
has drastically reduced America’s CO2 levels:
The reduction is
even more impressive when one considers that 57 million additional energy
consumers were added to the U.S. population over the past two decades. Indeed,
U.S. carbon emissions have dropped about 20 per cent per capita, and are now at
their lowest level since Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961.
Yet activists don’t
want us to do that here. We have to build windmills and pay double or treble
for the energy. We must ready ourselves for power cuts every time the wind
stops blowing. WE MUST DO WITHOUT.
Next we come to the
e-cigarette. Here is a device that in just a few years has taken 1.3 million
people partially or completely off cigarettes in Britain. This is something that
the ban on smoking in public places completely failed to do, as will the
cutting of cigarette displays or the proposed introduction of plain packaging.
Yet e-cigs must be legislated against and if possible banned. They must be stopped! No
matter that they are saving lives. Ban them. No matter that they are no more
harmful than a cup of coffee. Ban them!
Why is that? I
submit that it is due to the puritan and punitive instincts of many ‘activists’ who are no better than proselytizing religious zealots. In a transition to
a green renewable energy culture the hair shirts must be distributed, to be
worn over bodies already self-flagellated by sustainable birch twigs. You must
go without cars, beef steaks and must sit shivering in your house squinting at the
latest Greenpeace pamphlet in the light of a low-energy bulb, if the power is
on. If you’re a stinky smoker then how dare you find a way to avoid all the
dangerous aspects of smoking and still enjoy its pleasures! You must suffer all
the torments of withdrawal, or become a medicated patient of the NHS and suffer
the humiliation of quit-smoking classes for your instruction, and only then,
when suitably chastened, are you fit to join the company of your betters.
And, of course, in
both cases: ONLY THROUGH SUFFERING CAN YOU ATTAIN REDEMPTION!
3 comments:
There is also a large degree of monument building involved. Politicians like large, visible projects that will be named after them. They all dream of their own Hoover Dam, space station, millennium dome, library or... vast stretch of windmills that can be seen for miles. Having a number of temporary and virtually invisible fracking rigs doesn't feed their grandiose egos.
They also like legislation they can boast about but all the things that really need banning have already been done (William Wilberforce, for example, in 1807). So we get politicians trying to build-up small or non-existent issues into large ones. But do they really expect their own monument in Westminster Abbey for them enforcing wearing of seatbelts? Probably...
As for fracking, don't let the facts get in the way of a good protest
http://nohotair.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2446:myths-and-facts&catid=184:uncategorised&Itemid=232
can't remember where I found this.
A
Post a Comment