A Twofer

I just wanted to share a couple of quick thoughts today.

Regular readers will be surprised at how short this post is – not too pleasantly surprised, I hope.

The common thread of these two subjects is stupidity. I promise to limit it to two, though you might be aware that we are suffering from a pandemic.

It gets a bit tiresome to be looked down upon for the sin of being educated. People glory in their ignorance. They scoff at those who have worked hard to earn credentials and labored mightily to gain experience.

When did everyone become an expert? Why does anyone bother learning anything?

I’m reminded of the short period I managed a theater. The number of employees varied seasonally but at the peak was about 95, perhaps 90 were high school students. I hung a sign on my office wall that suggested one hurry and hire a teenager, while he still knew everything.

Have people ceased growing up?

After trying desperately to find a way of explaining about job creation simple enough for a politician to understand, the guy just brushed it off as “liberal” nonsense, as though he actually understood the concept of job creation or the meaning of the word liberal.

He felt he had offered the ultimate in dismissive retorts by stating that even his 3-year old granddaughter could understand how to create jobs. I simply replied that his problem was in depending upon his granddaughter for his understanding of economics.

Next

It appears that, once again, Obama is going to compromise by giving the opposition everything they asked for. I’m concerned for the day when they realize that they could have gotten much more, if only they had asked for more.

Obama seems ready to fully capitulate to the oil industry. Canada has the second largest energy deposit in the world. The problems are that it isn’t oil and it is locked up in what are called tar sands. US coal is the world’s largest energy deposit but they haven’t found an economical way of running our cars on it.

All you need to do to get oil from the tar sands is to rape a delicate ecosystem, cover huge expanses of land and water with toxic chemicals, provide fire for people’s kitchen faucets, create the pollution equivalent of 13 refineries to extract it from more than a mile beneath the surface, convert it into oil and pipe it across Canada and the US to Texas, where you’ll have to build more refineries in the most polluted state in the country. I’m speaking of their air and water, not their politics.

We have passed the peak of oil production. The end of oil is predictable and foreseeable. The sensible path would be to find alternatives to petroleum. The entire ecosystem that we call home is already suffering tremendous damage and global warming is both the result and an additional environmental insult.

Instead of spending tremendous efforts to continue developing what is just another delay, another source for petroleum, we should be concentrating our efforts on types of energy that might possibly allow us to stop further damage.

It’s all about money and a refusal to mess with the comfort zone of the energy tycoons. It’s as though they were the business equivalent of couch potatoes. They could direct their massive profits into alternatives but just want to sit on their, uh, . . . money.

Instead, we get assaulted with a constant stream of commercials trying to convince us that the dirtiest, most ecologically dangerous form of energy is the cleanest and safest.

Okay. It isn’t short but it is briefer than usual.

.

.

Tagged as: canada, create, Economics, ecosystem, energy, environment, expert, global warming, high school, hire, ignorance, job, liberal, money, oil, pandemic, pipe, Politics, refinery, stupid, tar sands, teenager, theater