Tag Archives: Environment

Green Jobs, Clean Air, Secure Future

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If I were running for election in 2012, these are the three issues I’d run on:

  1. Green jobs
  2. Clean air and water
  3. Strong national security

Green Jobs: Move our workforce into a sustainable future. For example, take workers off the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and put them to work making wind generators and solar panels. You heard me: the pay is the same; it’s less dangerous; and it’s sustainable. Like Pres. Obama says:

We need to get behind this innovation. And to help pay for it, I’m asking Congress to eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies. I don’t know if — I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re doing just fine on their own. So instead of subsidizing yesterday’s energy, let’s invest in tomorrow’s.

…and this leads to Big Thing #2…

Clean Air and Water: No more oil rigs in the Gulf means no more volcanos of oil soiling the water, the beaches and marshes of the Gulf coast. Come on, stop being in denial — you know it’s going to happen again and again and again. So stop tempting fate. There’s too much at stake.

And another thing: hunters and fishermen — not typically a Democratic constituency — will be with you on this. You will get their votes in great numbers because they respect what a clean environment means to them and their children.

In Lousiana, for example, it means giving your children what your parents gave you: an opportunity for a job, an opportunity for recreation, an opportunity for freedom. A filthy environment takes all of that away from you. It forecloses the future.

[Sotto voce: You're also doing the right thing to mitigate climate change.]

All Americans have that common goal: to eventually give the environment to our children so that they can carry on the legacy we received from our parents.

Strong National Security: Energy independence means you can eventually stop being held hostage by hostile oil-producing states that use the money we pay at the pump to fund terrorism around the globe. Dry up that money and you take away a lot of their power.

Again, this is something that everyone — Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives — can agree on: when you buy foreign oil, you are funding terrorists. So move our economy into a greener future. It will provide sustainable jobs and will give our children a cleaner safer world — and make us safer against the outside forces of terror.

So my imaginary stump speech would conclude with this: No one — no nation — has ever cut its way to prosperity. To prosper, you have to do big things.

UPDATE: Here’s what my Congressman Rep. Bill Cassidy (LA-06) says:

“We in Louisiana understand that wind and solar can never replace natural gas and oil, and that’s what he spoke about doing tonight,” Cassidy said after the president’s speech.

That reminds me of what Henry Ford once said: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

…Or what I’ve seen on more than one motivational poster: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

…Or what Marshall McLuhan said: “The future of the future is the present. And this is what people are terrified of.”

The 9 most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from BP and I’m here to help you.”

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For nearly 50 years, it has been an article of faith and dogma that Reagan’s words were the truth: “The 9 most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ ”

Well, those days are gone. We live in an age when private industry has been handed dominion over our environment — for jobs! — and the result…well, let Bill Maher lay it out for you:

You know, it’s Washington gospel that jobs in the private sector are better than government jobs. You even hear Democrats saying it.

But oil jobs are private, and look at the toil this industry takes: cooking the planet, enslaving us to Saudi Arabia, killing animals…

Yes, the oil industry creates jobs. So does the kiddie porn industry.

I mean, can you imagine someone making this argument: that business must be allowed to dump toxic waste right into our waterways, because treating it is expensive, and that will cost jobs and growth. Well, is that really so different from someone on CNBC talking about the need for continued deep water drilling?

This week, [Louisiana Senator David Vitter] finally found a place to draw a line in the now shit-brown flammable sand of his home state. He told President Obama, you must not stop drilling, because it would affect jobs and growth. Yes, David Vitter says a moratorium on more drilling could potentially be devastating for Louisiana. Only a Republican can look at a dead ocean and say, “Boy, I sure hope Big Government doesn’t turn this into something bad!”

You know, maybe your job needs to go when it starts killing things.

You want solutions? He’s even got a few of those:

If the government hired away all the 58,000 oil workers who work now in the state of Louisiana, and paid them their same salary to work repairing infrastructure and building solar panels, it would cost us $5.5 billion, which the Pentagon loses every day in the couch. Wouldn’t that be worth it?

Watch it — he starts up at 2:00 into the video:

Beckians Fight Litter and Liberals

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The National Mall as the 9/12 Tea Party winds down.

Gateway Pundit, is still pushing the absurd claim 2 millions Glenn Beck fans gathered in Washington DC during their union-created weekend, arriving on liberal funded public transportation to a publicly maintained park, to protest, uhh … something … taxes? Czars? Fixing health care? Commies, Fascists, Kenyan Presidents who look like Alfred E. Newman with a Hitler mustache? Democrats? I don’t really know what they were protesting to be quite honest.  Fluoridated water maybe? Who knows. 

Whatever. Conservatives gathered in the only U.S. city with no Congressional representation for the movement’s latest Tea Party, completely unaware (once again) of the ironic nature of the name they’ve adopted for these stunts. No doubt seeing signs in shop windows saying “No taxation without representation” lulled them into a sense of faux security.

G.P.’s photo essay uses the above picture to “prove” liberals are still the filthy hippies they hated at Woodstock, complete with post inauguration pictures of a mess left when the Mall was filled last January, and conservatives are clean.

See, a hitherto unknown tendency of Republicans is that they don’t litter.  They are so connected with the environment, they’d do nothing to defile its beauty — especially in a sacred spot like the seat of the Government they just cannot stand.

Now to my untrained eye, the scene shows a sparsely attended assembly that hardly trod on the grass, let alone anyone’s liberty, putting the lie to claims that the crowd reached six figures, let alone seven.  But what does this dirty fucking hippy know anyway.

So, it’s good to know that among it’s many (so damn many) facets, the conservative movement is also reverent of Washington DC’s pristine glory.  So rapt of the Capital’s majesty they could not bear to trash the place, disposing of their empty bottles of water (and other precious bodily fluids) properly.