I was doing laundry earlier today when a little boy started playing with the faucet. He opened the water and left it that way as he ran over to his mom. I later found out that the mother had to come over and close the water every time. It was the little boy's way of attracting attention. All I could think of was how much water was being wasted. More and more, I think about these things.
The reason why I think more about the environment has nothing to do with my political views, however. I despise the idea of paying a tax to the government to "offset" my "carbon footprint". If paying higher taxes was all it took to clean-up the environment, I'd be all for it. The "cap and trade" taxes are all about cleaning-up my wallet. No one really thinks, in their heart of hearts, that it will do a single thing. What will work is just plain and simple ingenuity.
We went to the moon in less than ten years from when President Kennedy issued his challenge to do so. Why not issue a challenge to both private and public industries to reduce world-wide pollution (not just carbon emissions) in ten years? I mean, we would kill the U.S. carbon emissions by simply dismantling some of the hundreds (or thousands) of nuclear bombs in our arsenal and building some nuclear power plants. Despite what you may think, nuclear power would yield only about a soda can's worth or nuclear waste per person that uses electricity... Waste that, like the soda cans, can be recycled and used for medical diagnostic imaging.
But, no, environmentalists will not have that. They want solar and wind power only. Guess what? Solar power tops off at about 5 horsepower per square meter, and that's at 100% efficiency. That's good enough to heat some water, but not more than that. Wind energy? Not much better. Yes, both are a start, and both, at 100% efficiency, would complement nuclear really well. But Three Mile Island and Chernobyl scare the daylights out of people, for some strange reason. The hundreds of times planes have gone down, killing more people than those two nuclear accidents combined (no one died at Three Mile Island), those many planes down don't scare people from flying. We humans are funny that way.
So, yes, I want to clean up the environment, stop burning so much coal and wood, and stop polluting and wasting water. But I don't want to do it by paying higher taxes. I want to do it by buying fuel and electricity from companies that are more environmentally friendly. I want to do it by buying recycled items and other stuff from companies that are more environmentally friendly. And I want to do it on my own... I pay enough taxes already. Hey, I guess I'm not that Liberal after all.
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