dwndrgn said:
I just read this man's editorial:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/14/AR2005121401933.html
and I have no idea where he was going other than a specific site in Alaska should be drilled. I don't get his collectivism point because it doesn't seem very logical to me but I want to make sure I'm not ignoring the logic because I think this guy is an a$$hat.
Well, as I understand it- he claims that drilling there won't do any damage because the damage has already been done. That there is the potential to get as much oil out of there as is presently imported from Saudi Arabia (for three or four years from his figures) That this would eliminate the energy shortage caused by hurricane damage (ignoring the fact that this energy shortage was largely due to damage to refineries, rather than shortage of crude, and this has been generally put at the door of the oil companies' total lack of investment)
The claim is that the environmentalists- those who try to maintain nature reserves sacrosanct, and presumably those who consider that fossile fuel burning is in itself questionable, and any reduction in it can only be positive are fronting for the evil communists (community= collective, but communism is out of fashion as a word) who want more government control and to take away your motor car (or make it too expensive to run) by introducing a scarcity economy, so that people are made dependent on authority and become less self dependent (note that people who make this claim also state that Americans were far more independant in the past, when they had much less- so the logic is a little difficult ) See, nasty people prefer animals and trees to human beings, and even if we didn't get any petroleum it would be worth doing just to show them they can't stand in the way of progress- besides, caibou (the only animals in the region big enough to be hunted, and thus the only ones the American public will recognise) just love oil pipelines.
I may be a touch cynical, but I post on another site where three quarters of the members would agree with his opinion- where just the idea of ecology or conservation is the mark of the devil, and while I don't hold with the more extreme views of the ecological movement, I do feel that a certain um… moderation is called for, even if it's only because we don't know exactly what we're doing, what the ultimate results will be.
