Caution: Republicans Are Bad For Your Health

By Number Six

Sunday, October 09, 2005 at 06:34 AM

In a recent story, Kevin Knobloch of The Union of Concerned Scientists insists that fighting global warming would actually be good economically...

Knobloch, speaking in Cleveland, says that many of the alternates to fossil fuels aren't just beneficial for the biosphere, but will deliver a nice shot in the rump of a limp economy.

Farmers, for example, would benefit from renting land for windmills, not to mention the technologies required to crank out biofuels, on and on and on.

Shit. I've been saying that for years now, even to the point of suggesting, well, were I in the White House? Well, where JFK wanted to go to Luna, I'd deliver my very own "Project Independence", an Apollo-like effort to totally eliminate not just imported oil, but to run the US totally on stuff we make here. Nyahhhh!

The ideas themselves, like Apollo, would require massive funding to engineers, tech firms, colleges and all of that to rid ourselves of a drug habit we cannot seem to kick: hydrocarbons.

Of course, such an idea and ideas come with detractors out the wazoo. Wanna guess where? Oh, come on, I'll give you a hint. Begins with an "R".

"Are you outa your liberal mind?", the RepubliBorg collective intone. "Sign the Kyoto accord, and what, wreck the economy?"

Here we go again, eh?

Of course it would: The search for non-polluting totally renewable energy sources will cripple the economy....of Haliburton, Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, BP Amoco, Occidental, and of course, anyone who's a pal of Das Lowenpolls, who, over the last whatever are free to pollute like nobody's business.

It's all about cash, of course. The energy barons see renewable sources as something they'd not want to see come. For one, they can't monopolize on it. Hard to trademark the wind, of course. And synthesizing liquid hydrogen from seawater? I can do it without their help: A few hundred thousand, a lot of electricity, about a hundred workers, oh, lots of refrigeration stuff. Send trucks down the road to the fuel stations. Sign checks. Grin. Retire to Boca.

Secondly, eliminating hydrocarbon emissions also means, oh, yes, dear heart, enforcing environmental laws, which would send all those polluters to jail, or into Chapter 11, whining like spanked brats to their paid-for congressional lap dogs, eh?

And yet, many techs, engineers, PhD's, and even economists are warning them and hard: Shit or get off the pot. Freeing ourselves of hydrocarbons is coming, like it or lump it.

And it is: In recent months, the go-ahead to build yet another "test" reactor for producing electricity, using themonuclear power will soon be a done deal in France. Windmills already abound in Europe. These items do not come with large EXXON emblems attached...and probably won't.

Iceland is at the leading edge. Already a big user of geothermal, their intent is to make themselves totally dependent on their own resources, and basically, tell OPEC to shove it sideways.

And I've asked, gee, why don't we? Isn't a lot of our politics a little too tied to dabbling in the middle east...because of that black slick shit we gulp down like...um....oil? Didn't somebody do a study not along that said, much to our pain, that everytime you and I dump 87 into the tank, we're helping make things worse in the middle east?

Okay, so a few major players have taken the hint, such as Chevron. Not Exxon. Okay, so they talk about it in their releases, but being a redneck, we sort of need something called "show it ta me". I ain't seen a truck yet with an Exxon emblem that also says DANGER - FLAMMABLE - REFRIGERATED HYDROGEN.

And why should they? It's all about them controlling the supply and we being dumb enough to let them keep the monkey on our backs. Soon, as the price of oil goes further upwards, Canada will become a giant septic tank, as exploitation...oops..development of "dirty oil" takes place. I feel for them in that. Dirty oil processing is worse than having a diner next door that sells poop sandwiches.....and all of that just so we can keep those NCC-1701-sized SUV's, true?

And of course (and of course), they pay off the Republigoons to allow them to get away with it. So, as long as we keep the Republicruds around, well, the monkey's not only stuck to our spines, but he stinks really bad, shits a kind of poop that makes Cat 6 hurricanes soon a reality, the skies blacker, and our kids....sicker.

Now, if we could just find ourselves a surgeon general to mandate applying a warning sticker to them, eh?