Another example of flawed conservative thought
So, one of the challenges that I’ve talked about repeatedly is how money isn’t value, it is a pointer to it. And I think this is a important thing to remember, just in general. However, someone who will remain nameless talked about how Biden “was going to stop all fracking and it was going to make things more expensive for me”.
Well, first of all, Biden’s not going to stop all fracking. He’s just going to keep us from expanding fracking. But second of all, fracking is something we do that increases costs to all of us enormously. It’s a monumentally dumb thing to do because we’re damaging the most valuable resource on the planet, water, something we all need, in order to get something that’s readily available, energy. (The sky is literally raining soup here.)
The thing that you have to remember, when thinking about this, is fracking’s cost is hidden in the future. It’s huge – probably trillions of dollars – but you don’t pay it now, you pay it 20 or 50 or 100 years from now.
If you don’t frack, we have less natural gas and we have to depend on other sources of power. (The same friend pointed out that there are clouds and days with no wind – I didn’t point out about hydro and pumped storage, or flow batteries, or electrolysis and hydrogen.)
Now, if we do the sensible thing (solar, hydro, wind, next-gen nuclear) all of the sources of power will be considerably cheaper in measured cost to get them than fracking. The cost of energy *in real resources and human lives* will go *down*.
If we do frack, we destroy the groundwater, we lose millions of gallons of water to the process, and we condemn our children to have to spend trillions of dollars cleaning up our mess. Naturally republicans are in favor, because to them, the money *is* the value. They see it making greenbacks now, and the idea of tracing value flows instead of tracing money is beyond them.
It opens a interesting side idea. What about a government where in order to serve as a congresscritter, you have to show certain abilities? A meritocracy, in other words. I would *love* to see a sport pilot license as a minimum requirement to be a congresscritter. (Learning to fly a airplane teaches you a lot of important life lessons). Even more interesting would be one in which you had to show significant proficiency in C. (Hey, at least that way I’d know they knew what pointers *were*)
January 2nd, 2021 at 9:21 am
All for a meritocracy. Atm, the only thing a politician has to be proficient at is blowing enough smoke up your ass to start a ham factory or skullduggery.
There are a lot of things at play here, though. *We* can take an aggressive stance on renewable energy with all of its inherent startup costs and people screaming at you that it “doesn’t work the same”, but those other countries won’t feel obliged to do the same. The planet can be hammered silly from any given location thereupon, it isn’t just the US.
As far as a pilot’s license or learning C, C+,C++, well isn’t that what they told the factory workers to do when the bastions of corporate hooery sold off American jobs to the lowest bidder? Nothing’s gonna change until somebody in a 6,000.00 suit walks up to a man in dungarees and a hard hat and the man in the hard-hat says “who the f*** is you, sonny Jim?”
Authority postures are dangerous to the disaffected and gullible.