Tuesday, August 05, 2008

A thing of beauty

The Hammond Report finds this beautiful. I guess there is no accounting for taste.

I grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast in the 1950s and '60s, a time when development of all known resources went on without qualm or reservation. A lot of words could be used to describe what that looked like, but "beautiful" would not be among them.

All that development had a lot of consequences, some of them good. But some of them led a lot of people like me to want to live somewhere else.

Look, I'm a big boy. I understand that the gasoline I burn in my car every day has to come from somewhere, and I understand that a price has to be paid. But I don't understand how envirophobes like Hammond and Hannity can simply close their eyes to the cost.

A few years ago, Hannity was telling his callers, Let not your heart be troubled. Drive your SUVs. There will be plenty of gas.

Not that we are dealing with the inevitable consequences of that kind of thinking, do the Hannitys of the world don sackcloth and ashes? No. They remain as destructive as ever, mining, burning, cutting, drilling until the last ounce is gone. And heaping ridicule on anyone who suggests there might be a better way.

Then they have the nerve to call it beautiful.

3 comments:

jcurmudge said...

In the early 1960's I drove through the Tea Pot Dome area of Wyoming. Hundreds (or more) of oil rigs dotted the land. Exciting for an olf Eaasterner, but beautiful - no. A few years ago I drove that way again off the Interstate just to show my wife what it looked like. Desolate! Few wells, and truly an ugly place.

Anonymous said...

We can drill all we want and have spills from Maine to Miami, Seattle to San Diego. Say we get 2 million barrels a day. Guess what? OPEC drops production 2 million barrels a day. It's not a free market. It's a cartel. The same thing happened when North Sea oil came on line.

Dave said...

Earth First!
(We'll strip mine the other planets later...)