We ignore nasty reminders at our peril
March 17, 2011 at 7:00 pm in Alexandria Echo Press
We humanoids in this arrogant world need a nasty reminder every now and then that we ain’t quite so smart as we think we are.
For example, can anything be quite as stupid as building a nuclear power plant at the very edge of an earthquake fault zone? Continue Reading
“It’s no wonder mankind keeps marching lockstep to its doom. This greed for energy and more energy is like the insatiable dragon that ends up consuming itself. It is, in short, a suicidal way to live.”
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
I don’t know where to begin to criticize this editorial. Perhaps I’ll start by attacking its central theme: “greedy” capitalists are conspiring to ravage the planet, fatten their wallets and leave us all destitude. This has become the mantra of hysterical liberals for decades now and it’s just plain nonsense.
Cars run on gasoline, homes are heated by natural gas and electricty is produced by nuclear power and burning coal, because they are the most efficient ways of providing energy that everyone needs to heat their homes, run their appliances and move about. That’s how we live and that’s how a free market economy works. It’s not the conspiracy liberals want you to believe. It’s the free market doing what it does best: providing goods and services at the cheapest price so that people can afford and make use of them.
The hysterical voices in the media have already determined that the situation in Japan is armageddon-like, probably the same voices that predicted the demise of the Gulf of Mexico last year that never came to be.
How many people died at Three Mile Island?
Life is risky, to be sure. In the wake of accidents, however, we learn and improve the technology. When people first started travelling by air, crashes occurred at a much higher rate than they do now, but we learned and improved the technology so that it’s better for everyone. We didn’t abandon airplane travel, because our desire to move around faster was somehow perceived as “greedy.”
The rate of people who died in car crashes was far greater forty years ago than it is today, but we didn’t get rid of cars, even though our desire to move around independently and inexpensively was somehow being “greedy.”
Demonizing technology, or the very way we live for that matter, is not the answer. Nor are biofuels, windmills and solar collectors, until and unless they can compete with oil, gas and nuclear in price. If and when that day comes, heck yes–go for it.
Free market capitalism will find the answers better than the likes of people who would like to vest control of the economy in the government and mandate inefficient measures for their own, usually political, purposes.
Don’t forget: the only nuclear accident to ever kill anyone was in a centralized economy.
And global warming…don’t get me started.
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