All Posts Tagged With: "Things"

For those of you who have not read the previous 1,021,947 editions, you may just have to wait for my Book of Specific Ignorance.

While looking at photographs taken this month in Glacier Bay, Alaska, I was told that at one time maybe only a couple of hundred years ago, this bay did not exist, that what is now water was solid glaciers.

That stimulated me to do some exhausting research on The Google and I found this link after maybe 15 seconds.

I must have studied it for about a minute or two and think I learned that when John Muir visited in the 1870s the glacier that bears his name was about 200 feet high and was calving even then. It is now tiny.

Naturally it is hard to not think of today’s “settled science” on greenhouse gases. Kind of like the Iraq war is “settled”.

I love nature and while hiking in national forests, stay on hiking trails most of the time except to, you know, and I try to pickup more trash than I bring in but I do drive a gasoline fueled car and heat my home with ground based energy because it is the most convenient and cheapest I know about. This may sound like a lot of you out there in the hypocrisphere but I am pretty sure most of you want the earth to remain friendly to our way of life, as I do.

Why then do I not know whether mankind is causing global warming or what we are going to do to move away from otherwise polluting and politically charged energy sources?

Oil companies want to drill oil because that is their business, so they promote oil. And we all use their product in many ways, even though we do have alternatives, although not necessarily convenient or cheap ones.

Similarly, solar companies promote solar energy, wind companies promote wind energy, bio fuels companies, well you get the point. I say let them at it. If one or more of them produces inconvenient and uncompetitive products let them eat cake, if they can still afford it. And if they make a profit, more power to them.

What pun?

So why is it that, while I really do not know much about greenhouse gases, I am by the day growing more anxious about the various unsavory consequences of our energy situation now and in the future.

Why is it that the climate change movement seems more like a political movement and an economic opportunity for those who scare and offer help? I am studying how to live off the grid because I want off. Beside being afraid, I feel guilty and I don’t like that. Do you like it when you are criticized by those who pollute more than you do?

And the green movement seems like a new style and design environment, much of which I think is cool. I buy green, love those new bamboo shirts, they hardly wrinkle.

While I still do not know the answer, actually having trouble remembering the question, I do know that partisan politics and greedy capitalism come in a lot of guises. Thank goodness for ubiquitous greedy capitalism. With the right amount of regulation, it is the best reflection of nature that man can create. Or woman.