The Sir Humphreys of the British bureaucracy have released a report calling for a full-scale retreat from the War Against Oil.
The original white paper given former PM Tony Blair called for the country to cut carbon emissions just 20% by the year 2020, mostly through insulation and other conservation measures.
The new briefing paper calls this unrealistic, suggesting nuclear power be substituted for renewable sources.
Even before the War Against Oil gets going, publications like Rupert Murdoch’s Times have taken to ridiculing the very idea of conservation or environmental thoughtfulness with a regular Eco Worrier feature, in which people are ridiculed for trying to make ecology-friendly choices in their daily lives.
I’ve also been seeing some truly-disgusting ads from my local power company, filled with trains of coal and calling for "balanced energy" choices. This from a company that burns coal willy-nilly without any attempt at carbon sequestration and is killing my kids slowly with its soot. (These are accompanied, believe it or not, by a program for schoolchildren, pushing the same political nonsense.)
The point I want to make about this is, no matter how firm the political support may be for fighting global warming, or the War Against Oil, that the opponents of action have an enormous amount of money, power and inertia on their side. No matter how we may phrase the need, in order to win the political battle, winning an election means the battle will have just begun.
In the battle of your life, the convenience of killing you is very great, very real, and bears careful watching.
The diagram to the left, from the Clean Air Task Force, shows the deaths it attributes to power plant pollution in 2020. The estimate for the Atlanta metro area is 10-20 per 100,000. Most of the region expects 20-30 per 100,000, mainly because of "balanced" coal-fired electrical plants.
If we could make certain those deaths would be solely from within the families of Georgia Power executives, I might not mind. But we can’t.
In order to succeed we all have to make survival our highest priority, and understand that The War Against Oil is just that — a war for the survival of our children and grandchildren. We have to be ready to reject people who are nominal allies and who refuse to see the urgency. We have to be ready to reject any company which gets in the way. And we have to be ready to do this at all levels — local, state and federal, economic, political and social.
Anyone who opposes the War Against Oil wants your kids dead. Understand that and don’t take their bullshit.
