Passage of the Day: George Will on ANWR and Anti-Energy Environmentalists
Amen brother (link requires registration; HT OpinionJournal.com’s Political Diary e-mail):
….. although there are active oil and gas wells in at least 36 U.S. wildlife refuges, stopping drilling in ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) has become sacramental for environmentalists who speak about it the way Wordsworth wrote about the Lake Country.
….. But for many opponents of drilling in the refuge, the debate is only secondarily about energy and the environment. Rather, it is a disguised debate about elemental political matters.
For some people, environmentalism is collectivism in drag. Such people use environmental causes and rhetoric not to change the political climate for the purpose of environmental improvement. Rather, for them, changing the society’s politics is the end, and environmental policies are mere means to that end.
….. Therefore, one of the collectivists’ tactics is to produce scarcities, particularly of what makes modern society modern — the energy requisite for social dynamism and individual autonomy. Hence collectivists use environmentalism to advance a collectivizing energy policy. Focusing on one energy source at a time, they stress the environmental hazards of finding, developing, transporting, manufacturing or using oil, natural gas, coal or nuclear power.
A quarter of a century of this tactic applied to ANWR is about 24 years too many. If geologists were to decide that there were only three thimbles of oil beneath area 1002, there would still be something to be said for going down to get them, just to prove that this nation cannot be forever paralyzed by people wielding environmentalism as a cover for collectivism.
Personnally, I don’t favor the ANJWR drilling, as I beieve it’s too little benefit to be worth the trouble. My vision may be clouded, however, by the fact I was raised by caribou.
Climate change has put nuclear energy back in the news big time. If you wish to know more about it without intense studying, there is a new a techno-thriller novel about the American nuclear power industry, written by a longtime nuclear engineer (me). This book provides an entertaining and accurate portrait of the nuclear industry today and how a nuclear accident would be handled. It is called “Rad Decisionâ€, and is at RadDecision.blogspot.com. There is no cost to readers.
http://RadDecision.blogspot.com
Comment by James Aach — December 18, 2005 @ 1:13 pm