Heh

Crichton's book has this conversation that I've been longing to hear in real life:

"Sequoias are sentinels and guardians of the planet? They have a message for us?

"Well, they do--"

"They're trees, Ted. Big trees. They have about as much of a message for mankind as an eggplant.

I've been saying that environmentalism is a religion for a long time--it even uses the vocabulary of religion. It's fine for the government to spend on charities, but not if they're faith-based. Yet, we have a cabinet secretary for the environment.

It made sense once, when rivers were catching fire and you couldn't eat fish from Lake Erie. But now environmentalism is a bigtime business built around fundraising and preaching that human beings are a plague on the planet. And they're never satisfied. They have to keep feeding the crisis myth so that they can keep donations pouring in to keep the ball rolling. With media backing, they have us convinced that we need to undo the industrial revolution, that we can meet all our energy needs using hydrogen, wind and solar panels, with never a breath about the effects on nature these technologies might have.

If you hate smokestacks, you'll love having every skyline in the country lined with giant wind turbines, complete with service roads and power lines. They oppose every proven technology and want to sell us science fiction, without any kind of realistic analysis of what it will take to make it happen. All those off-the-grid houses are really neat, but they take a lot of lead-acid battery storage. Nobody talks about the amount of surface area that would have to be devoted to wind and solar in order to even maintain our current economy. Speaking of that, the people who are sold on this stuff are in decline, due to their belief that we're overpopulating the planet.

It takes real devotees to hold so many contradictory beliefs without noticing.