Stardate 20020601.2234

(On Screen): It seems like one of those classic Mad Magazine strips: what people say and what they're really thinking and how there's a significant disconnect between them. You can imagine it illustrated by Al Jaffee or someone like that.

There are people out there who hate everything that the industrial revolution has brought us. They think we're too rich; they think we're too comfortable. There are too many of us. They want to turn back the clock, make the human race smaller again, or if that can't be done at least make it so that the human race uses less. It takes different guises.

Think of it as the "snail darter" gambit. Someone planning to build a dam on your favorite river? Want to stop them? Find yourself some obscure fish living in that river and then get it declared an endangered species. Is the snail darter really all that important? Hell no. It was never about the snail darter. It was about opposing development.

Trying to force someone to stop logging? Wood is good; wood is useful; wood is consumed by this nation in immense quantities. It's not clear that the way it's being harvested now is the best there could be, but that's not what our friends really want. What they want is a complete stop to logging.

If they say "Stop the logging!" they'll get ignored. They've tried that for years. Then they discovered some magic words: "Spotted Owl." (And then a miracle occurred...)

These people want to force us to make do with less "for our own good". We're too greedy, and they don't believe in self-determination or, ultimately, in freedom. They know better than us how we should live, and since we won't do what they ask us to, they'll try to figure out how to force us to do it, via law or treaty or suit.

It's an application of a form of Parkinson's second law: delay is the deadliest form of denial. In this case, you don't signal your real agenda, which is to stop progress, but rather fight it in small pieces and hope to defeat in detail. Think people are using too much power? Trying to force them to use less? You won't get anywhere that way; so instead you don't say, "Stop building power plants." The way to do it is to fight each individual proposal for a power plant, and find some excuse for doing so. This power plant can't be built because it will endanger a fish; that one because it lowers property values; this other one over here because it will threaten stringent air quality standards; that one because it's near a minor earthquake fault. Oh, my, will you look at that! There isn't enough power being generated because not enough new plants are being built to cover increased demand. Shucky-darn; looks like everyone's gonna have to use less power. What an awful shame.

America is the big villain of this piece. It's just too damned successful. Its people work too hard; they produce too much. They make more and consume more than anyone else; it just isn't fair. And they refuse to slow down. So we'll just have to find a way to force them to slow down, one way or another.

And now we have the granddaddy of all ways to throttle back the US economy: the Kyoto accords on global warming. Let's start with the fact that the science on which this treaty is based is not even remotely complete or sufficiently detailed to actually justify the kind of investment and political commitment that the Kyoto accord involves. But that has nothing to do with anything, because the Kyoto accord isn't really about global warming.

The real issue goes under a code-phrase: "sustainable development", which means "The US is using too damned much of everything and won't stop."

It's somewhat more general than that, actually: the first world and especially the US is using too much; we (?) need to throttle back the First World and let the Third World catch up.

All of this is based on a fundamental assumption that it's a zero-sum game. If the industrialized nations are wealthy then the Third World cannot be. If we slow down the First World then we get more equality in the world. Well, we would. But not by helping those living in the Third World in any important way. We'd make everyone equally poor, not equally rich.

Energy is the key. Nothing happens without expenditure of energy. There's lots of rhetoric about "clean energy" but that's all it is; there are only two substantial alternate sources of energy which don't involve burning things. The others are all fantasies.

You got nuclear and you got hydro. That's it. It's possible to generate power intermittently with wind, but not very much. It's possible to generate power with tides. You can get some power from geothermal. You can get some from solar. But none of them can generate power in terawatt quantities, which is what we need for a modern industrial economy. The US overall generates about 4 terawatts of electricity, and a lot more energy is consumed in cars and trucks and trains and ships and other ways.

A really big wind plant might produce three hundred megawatts, but only when the wind is blowing. 4 terawatts is 13,000 three-hundred-megawatt power plants. Not gonna happen. There are nothing like that many sites, for one thing.

Ireland is going all out on this and is going to manage