Groundless Rant

The one thing I love about blogging is the total freedom to rant on and on about things that I have little to no point of reference on.  I can make whatever point I want based purely on conjecture, with no interruptions by annoying little facts, or research, or the opinions of others.

And be completely aware that most opinions are based on emotion, and experience, not fact.  And, our experience seem to be factual to us, when they are often misinterpretations of events, based on previously misinterpreted events. It is a vicious cycle.  On to the Rant:

WHY are environmental issues divided along party lines?  What about conservation could possibly be anti-Republican?  How is preserving your resources not a conservative value?  I grew up in a staunchly republican home.  "Waste not, Want not," was a rule, almost written in blood, except that writing in blood would be wasteful.  Living on a farm in the middle of nowhere requires a certain amount of conservation, organic farming, crop rotation, allowing fields to rest, etc. Made fiscal and long term use sense.  It wasn't cool, it just was.  We have known for my entire life that there isn't a bunch of available oil, that coal resources, and oil reserves will run out.  We also know how damaging drilling can be to the environment - not just from a natural beauty sense, but from a ruining our potential food source perspective.  We sink billions of dollars into the industry, sometimes completely wasted trying to get more of this stuff out of the ground.  We give a lot of lip-service to the possibility of alternative sources, always followed with, "these are great but you can't run an airplane or locomotive on it."   Why the hell not?

I am not an expert, and I do not have a multibillion dollar oil company backing me up, but if the same money was available to research and develop renewable sources, we would have them.  Money talks, and the power minds of our great nations could probably have us completely running on pig-farts in 10 years if the money was there.  Hell - my phone could probably handle all the data NASA needed for our first moon-walk. - Why? because somebody figured out early on that the money was in computers.

So back to my rant.  The democrats (love them - they are sort of my adopted family) have zero muscle on this sort of thing, especially when dealing with big oil.  The republicans - the party that I grew up in, that confounds me on every turn, pretty much has their head up the proverbial arse on this. So that sort of leaves us.  We get what we demand, right? Except the laws of supply and demand don't really apply here.  We need to get from point "A" to point "B" and if fossil fuels are what get us there, that's what we use.
and oh - yeah, there is our plastics addiction.  Remember glass drawers in refrigerators? Glass thermos bottles? bulk foods in grocery stores? paper wrapped sandwhiches?  I'm really not that old, and I remember this stuff.

Something has to be done, but first we have to acknowledge that it is an issue, and not a party issue.  I miss Charlie Crist!