Saturday, March 29, 2008

Earth Hour? Neo-Luddites Seek Darkness

Google has gone ahead and turned their front page in Europe black in solidarity with an event called Earth Hour. Like it's going to save power or something? If you're using the computer to read that page, you're not saving any electricity.

If you're that concerned about your energy usage, shut off your damned computer and get outside. Shut off your lights and computer when you leave the room. Turn off the television and read a book.

The preachy nature of this stuff is only getting more intolerable on a daily basis and I'm more than amenable to greening my environment. I bought my house to shorten my commute, don't have to drive anywhere as a result, and can go to work by train. I had CFLs before they became fashionable to do. I have cars that are relatively fuel efficient. I bought all kinds of insulation to improve my home's efficiencies, and am considering a tankless system for hot water as my existing conventional water heater is near.

I was regularly separating paper and plastic and recycling going back 20 years to when I would collect soda cans in summer camp to get the deposits.

Oh, and in the long range, many of those green choices will save me plenty of money - the green that speaks to me.

The preachy types at Google and all the rest who pray at the altar of Al Gore, talk plenty, but it's all just so much hot air. If they truly believed half the crap they spout off, they wouldn't be flying off all over the world, going and holding major conferences in one of the most remote cities in the world (Bali) that also happens to be in an environmentally sensitive location. They'd teleconference to accept their Nobel Prize crapulence for raising awareness of global warming, when the science itself is far less settled than they care to admit.

To top it off, since this issue is so important that it must be addressed today according to Gore's dire predictions or else the world will never recover, the same groups have decided to punt the issue along for another two years.

Oh, and it doesn't even begin to touch on the junk science that underpins much of what Gore and his ilk are preaching. This is just hypocrisy. The eco-nuts have decided that they want everyone to cut back on their power usage.

Yet, one has to wonder what exactly is accomplished by all this?

Google is pushing the earth night farce, and yet it has no problem seeking out server farms that eat up as much power as entire cities. They're also racing to build server farms around the world in places that do not have environmental restrictions and where power is mostly generated using emission spewing power plants. That flies in the face of their claims that they're going green.

The eco-nuts would like you to believe that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. That means every time a person exhales, they're creating pollution. In other words, when you boil down their attempt to tax carbon emissions, they're pushing the theory that people are polluting by existing, and their policies are intent upon limiting population growth because as people become more affluent, they buy more items, which takes energy to produce and pollution is created. The original sin here is not the smokestack emissions, but the very act of existing.

This is where these neo-Luddites seek to bring people around the world.

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