Environmentalism

I consider myself a environmentalist. Now I'm no hippie fruit-loop driving a Prius, or hugging every tree I come across. I'm a practical Environmentalist. I recycle what I can, and toss into the garbage what I cannot. I willingly spend extra money on items that have less poisons in them, like mercury - free batteries, etc. I think everyone needs to step back and look at the big picture.

A good example of this is I-95 and Boston. You see back in the 50's they were building the highway infrastructure around Boston, and they were going to connect Rt 1, I-93, I-95 and Rt. 3 into Boston. But there is a 5 acre swamp that has some endangered bird that nests there right in the way. Well the "Environmentalists" shit a brick that this bird would have to find somewhere else to nest, and sued the government to stop the highway from being built. So they won, and I-95 was never connected to the hub of Boston.

I often ask myself, while stuck in traffic, just how many animals and plants have died from the pollution caused by not continuing I-95 into Boston? Environmentalists are trying to stop a commuter rail (i.e. purple line) from connecting to Fall River. There must be hundreds of people who want to ride the train, but they keep fighting the rail line. Let's see 1000 cars times 51 mile commute = an assload of pollution. That's a lot more pollution than 10 train trips a day, and the trains are wicked efficient.

I think that there is a global warming problem. I don't think it's anywhere near as bad a Al Gore thinks it is, but I have seen changes in my own lifetime. Now that solar activity has decreased, bringing on a micro-ice age we won't see the temperature changes at all. But if we were in a very active solar period I think we would have melting ice caps, etc. I figure it makes hot periods much, much hotter, and cool periods only slightly warmer.

I look at it this way, I could go shit on my lawn, but it's just common sense not to. Likewise, we could just pump assloads of CO2 into the atmosphere, but there is a better way. We can pollute out rivers and streams with PCP's or figure out a different way to make our products. We can continue to have urban sprawl of abandoned buildings in the city while companies build new facilities in the 'burbs, or we can give tax breaks to companies that use buildings in the city.

To me it's all common sense, but these days "common" sense isn't to common. Use the methane given off by landfills and cowshit. Use solar and wind electricity. Get our space program back on track and build and orbit to ground power station using solar electricity. Buy products with less packaging. Buy American products that didn't have to be shipped from Asia. Take advantage of community composting. Cut back on the insane taxes on diesel fuel so we can buy common-rail diesel engines for our cars?

Oh yeah, the Prius has a bigger carbon footprint than a Hummer. Don't even get me started with the make-believe statistics they use.