I know--I make words up. But I have a Eng. Lit. degree somewhere (which is why I work customer service right now) and I consider it my "poetic license" to make up words. Just like John McCain considers his congressional experience, and POW experience, and whatever other experience, his license to make stuff up about his energy policy. This bothers me, especially since his campaign seems to be working the energy policy hard as a domestic issue. And I think he's a hack. And I give a damn about energy policy.
Okay--I don't post a lot. People might not know me--here's my deal: I am a Democrat because I am committed to Labor issues and health care-related issues and energy related issues largely because my dad was a lineman for an electric company and then became disabled, so I am really interested in stuff like regulation of industries, making sure everybody is covered if they have a health crisis, and also, I guess I've spent a lot of time thinking about where we get our power from and how it works. (I'm also a foreign policy nerd because my mom is a news-junky, but that isn't really relevant here.)
Everything about John McCain on the subject of energy pisses me off. And it especially pisses me off that he's decided to make the energy issue his domestic cornerstone, apparently because it polls really good, since people are cheesed off about "$4 a gallon gas." Oh, and very probably because in other domestic policy news--he has shit. He is a total dumbass about anything and everything having to do with how people live, what kind of money they make, how they budget, and why it matters. His health care policy must have been written by insurance company lobbyists,; it totally amounts to : "Your money or your life." Anyone with just a freaking high-school level concept of economics realizes he knows shit--but he wants to make a little speech on an oil rig...so here I will frame my problem with this pandering boob.
He believes that because once upon a time he acknowledged there might be such a thing as global warming, environmentally concerned people who understand the relationship between green-house gases and the effect will warm to his technology-minded support of nuclear energy. We'll throb to his ideas regarding "clean-burning coal" and even accept off-shore drilling as a short-term solution. He is a total idiot if he thinks people who care about these issues are ready to swallow anything of the sort.
Let's start with the "drilling" issue. God, how stupid does he think we are--or, sad to say, how stupid is he? Drilling for oil is not like tapping a keg. It's not like you know it's there and you put in a straw. There has to be research, and eeven if you find a good place to drill, you have to build an apparatus for extraction, and surprise, surprise, doing it underwater is a little different from doing it on land. Now, I suspect many people have a "Jed Clampett" notion that you could conceivably go shooting for some food, but tap crude instead. These people think Newt Gingrich is a genius. They also have family trees that do not fork and walk on their knuckles. Someone please paint this on a clay slab and use whatever hand gestures are appropriate to disabuse them of the notion that the off-shore oil leasses will mean squat to them in the next decade. Because the oil concerns in fact do have leases they aren't even using right now. And they don't pump those record profits necessarily into doing anything to boost refinement capability. It's an industry give-away--and no wonder McCain is raking in petro-bucks for endorsing it right now.
Now, as for nuclear--god I hate this pasty, wrinkly jackass. I do. I know nuclear is potentially clean. Uh-huh. Not carbon-based. Nice white little cooling towers. Little, you know, water, to keep things all...
Did you notice it depends on a radioactive substance being dug out of the ground and a still pretty much radioactive waste-product needing to be done away with? That thing they call radiaton--it is not good for you. Marie Curie found that out PDQ. If you can get brain cancer from a cell phone, how groovy do you really want to feel about nuclear power?
But let's just stow that line of reasoning, assuming I am your typical tree-hugging hippie who just hates progress. Three-Mile Island. Chernobyl. And a few fires and leaks in the current news. And the question of disposing of it.
Now, I know McCain likes the Yucca Mountain idea. Seems solid, even though it's on a faultline and I think the land is probably owned by the Western Shoshone, just like uranium mines are sometimes abutting Indian land, where kids play and breathe in toxic dust(what--too many arrows hit his stagecoach when he was a young'in?) but, maybe that's neither here nor there compared to the national security issue of transporting that stuff (still potentially "dirty bomb" material!) internationally to a place
everybody and his brother knows about. Um--seems stupid when you bother thinking about it.
Now, I am going to smack his pasty wrinkly behind up and down for the eight renewable energy votes he missed. Happy birthday, Johnny--these smacks are for you:
Aw, fuck it. I don't want to "tutch the but". I want to explain why renewable sources of energy are actually so much better and why he's a stupid git in thrall to industry money for never ever mentioning them and he sucks a lot. Okay, here goes--
Did you know energy is like--a grid? And production of energy can be switched at stations to wherever it's needed? More or less? That Enron fucked with that grid to make-believe they couldn't deliver the necessary power to poor old grandma's who sweltered in unairconditioned efficiency apartments while callous business-school majors decided how to not only screw their customers, but also siphon off the pensions of linemen in California? And stiff like that? That a grid doesn't give a good goddamn or by-your-leave-where the voltage comes from--whether solar or wind or whatever--it just routes energy where needed? And homes with solar panels can still be hooked up to that grid, even if they aren't exactly consumers--to take power if needed, to put out surplus if there is any? And that instead of thinking of energy as a commodity, which is sooooo 20th century, he could start looking at it as licensing of tech and access--you know, like cable tv? So enterprising companies offering new tech would, um, create jobs and still turn over valuable revenues. What a concept.
He is a senator from Arizona. They have abundant sunshine there. It would be a very natural place for someone to agitate in favor of solar energy--what the flock, John McCain! Is supporting renewable energy too "earmarky" for your taste? Well--here's your record, courtesy Tom Freidman:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/opinion/13friedman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=sloginHow do you (if you were John McCain) answer to that? Well, if you had to face a p.o.'d Vixengrl, you'd decide maybe Huckabee really deserved the nomination and you wanted no part of presidenial politics from here on in--because if you really cared about the environment and fuel costs, you'd know alternatives would mean a variety of supplies and that would mean oil companies wouldn't be monopolizing the game and they couldn't just "name their cost." And you'd recognize that adopting solar and wind would be truly local cogeneration (because, duh--oil can be drilled here, and just as easily exported for the right price) and we really wouldn't be so strung out on foreign oil. Because we'd be way more self-sufficient. You'd stop trying to grandstand like your bullcrap gas tax holiday would do anything, and you'd maybe face that the speculation (Enron loop-hole) should end as a real short-term fix--not like Phil Gramm would've ever clued you in on that.
And you'd also know I'd kick your wrinkly behind in. On principle. And then I'd tell you why you suck about the Middle East, but that's another story for another day. But anyhow, on the energy thing, felt like venting.
Um, support solar and like, the adaptation of plug-in technology. In ten years, I want to see parking lots with electrical sockets for every space and big old solar panels topping the usual lighting poles. And a "parking" meter, so you can pay back for the convenience of geting a refill. It's all possible. We just need to get beyond fossil fuels and fossil minds.
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