Sunday, April 6, 2014

The unenlightened self-interest which calls itself "environmentalism"

It seems there was a leak in a crude oil pipeline in Wilmington, California.  The result?  Calls for more regulation that will stifle (even further) the California economy.  The reason?
Residents that I spoke to the morning of the spill and those who have contacted my office since the incident have explained what they have gone through. The smell was nauseating and unbearable. Extensive drilling on the street is causing damage to driveways and even cracking tile flooring inside homes.
Gosh, it smells bad.  Better shut down the still sort of functioning smelly petroleum part of the California economy.  After all, there are still some tax payers there who haven't moved to Texas yet.

And as to the post title?  That's from George Carlin's magnificent take down of the environmental movement.  He really gets rolling around 1:50 into the video. ]Warning, strong language is probably not suitable for work, but it's George Carlin so you know this anyway]



I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists.  These white, bourgeois liberals who think that the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren't enough bicycle paths.  People trying to make the World safe for their Volvos.  Besides, environmentalists don't give a s*** about the Planet, they don't care about the Planet - not in the abstract!  You know what they're interested in?  A clean place to live.  Their own habitat.  They're worried that someday in the future they might be inconvenienced.  Narrow unenlightened self interest doesn't impress me.

Me, either.  I grew up downwind from a paper mill.  Smells like jobs, they used to say.  Let California freeze in the dark.  And so my response to the complaints that the smell was nauseating?  Gay.  Not as gay as Twilight, but Green is the new Pink.  And not in the fabulous way.

3 comments:

Paul, Dammit! said...

They're already paying $1 more a gallon than the rest of us. They demand their own formulation of gasoline, (CARBOB) which can be made out of state at a premium, I suppose. If they want to pay another buck a gallon for distillates, that's their nevermind. We can always build more ships. 10x the cost to ship (1.3-1.5c per gallon), plus more bottlenecks and weather-related price spikes. Awesome.

Jon said...

Cracks me up. We used to say the same sort of thing growing up in Lewiston, Idaho about the smell from PFI's paper mill. "Smells like money"

Goober said...

I grew up near lewiston and spend a lot of time there. The mill stinks, butwithout the mill there'd be no residents to complain.