Study This!

Maybe that's why I don't like those Greek letters, they're too damn elegant. They make it look like the guy who wrote the equation thinks that he's smarter and more sophisticated than I am. Being a reactionary, my first impulse is to say, "You're right, I'm just an ignorant stump jumper who couldn't possibly understand that equation. Why don't you find somebody who is more worthy than I and go bother him? All that Greek stuff is just a pain in the ass anyway. Who needs it?"

So what you are saying is that, if you want to know which studies are accurate, you need to study the studies. That's probably true, but who's got time to do all that? There are so many studies out there that studying them all would be a full time job. Come to think of it, it really is a full time job for some  people, which probably accounts for a significant chunk of the federal budget deficit. Two townships in which I have previously lived did something like that. One of them did it before I lived thee, and one of them did it after I moved away, but they both did the same thing. What they did is convince their people to vote for a bond issue to finance a sewer project. In both cases, all the money that was raised was used to conduct a study of the proposed project, leaving none left to actually install the sewers. When the citizens found out how much the actual sewers were going to cost, they refused to vote for the money needed to complete the project. One of the townships did eventually get their sewers but, by then, they needed to do another study before they could proceed because the original study was done too long ago to be relevant. The other township is still arguing about it. Now I suppose you do need to do a certain amount of studying before you start digging ditches all over the place but, when the study costs more than the whole project was supposed to cost, it makes people wonder why they ever thought they needed the sewers in the first place. Before that, everybody had septic tanks, and most of them worked just fine. The ones that didn't could have been repaired or replaced for a fraction of the cost of the sewer project.

When there is a controversial issue in which I am interested, I try to read stuff from both sides, just to be fair. Often I find out that the other side makes a few good points, even if I still disagree with their central premise. What they need to do is take the good points from both sides and see if they can put them together and formulate a third option that incorporates the best of both positions. For some reason, people seldom want to do that anymore, it's got to be all or nothing. Being a reactionary, my first impulse is to say, "Fine, it's nothing then!"

I guess I believe that carbon in the atmosphere makes the climate warmer, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. I understand that, if there was no carbon in the atmosphere at all, we'd all be dead. So how much is too much? How warm is the climate supposed to be? Who decides things like that?

I understand the logic behind raising the price of energy to encourage people to use less of it, and the latest reports are that Americans are already using less gasoline than they used to because of the price. But what's wrong with doing it the other way? In the paper mill we had two big boilers, one burned coal and the other burned natural gas. They mostly used the coal one, keeping the gas one in reserve because it was easier to turn on and off. For some period of time, I believe it was in the 1970s, natural gas actually was cheaper than coal, so they started using the gas boiler more and the coal boiler less. There was even some talk of getting rid of the coal boiler and replacing it with another gas boiler. It was a good thing they didn't, though, because the price of gas eventually went back up and they were glad that they had the coal boiler to go back to. So, like I said before, instead of making the dirty energy more expensive, they should make the clean energy cheaper. It should already be cheaper because wind, sunshine, and hydroelectric power are free. Sure you have to build the equipment but, after that, the only cost should be routine maintenance.