I just find it fascinating that you rail against environmentalists, when you seem to be a closet environmentalist yourself. It's an interesting dichotomy.
I'm a pragmatist. It's pragmatic to not overly abuse our environment to the point it's detrimental to our health and/or survival.
It's pragmatic to seek to replenish the ocean's nutrients when we're responsible for inadvertent intervention (soil conservation), especially when it has the added benefit of strengthening the marine food chain. After all, I like seafood.
It's pragmatic to wean ourselves off of foreign oil, especially when it's a major part of our trade deficit. Thus, I support PRAGMATIC and economically efficient alternative fuels that don't add appreciable costs to our economy. For that reason, natural gas conversion and algal bio-fuel research should be promoted for vehicles because it will be money that stays here in the US and employs American workers.
Additionally, it's pragmatic to focus upon augmenting BASELOAD electrical capacity and if this can be accomplished with geothermal, wave power, or nuclear pebble beds, we'll have the additional capacity to convert water into hydrogen (either via heat, or electricity), providing the supply base for the "holy grail" of alt-energy, a hydrogen economy.
On the other hand, IT'S NOT PRAGMATIC to trade oil dependency for Lithium dependency merely to build electric cars that cost twice as much as current technology.
It's not pragmatic to spend hundred's of billions on unreliable power generation via solar and wind; power that no one can truly rely upon when making business investment decisions.
It's not pragmatic to spend billions to pump CO2 into the ground when there is a biological system that has been proven to work over the eons and provides the additional benefit of feeding marine life.
Being environmentally conscious does not have to conflict with the desire to better humanity's condition on this planet. And pragmatically speaking, Mother Nature does far more damage to the current environment than mankind can even contemplate.
Hawk |
