enviroMENTALS

It would probably get a student suspended nowadays, but back when I was in middle school we used the term “mental” as an epithet for people or things we thought were stupid. “What are you, mental?” or “That’s so mental!” Being 13-year-olds, we found lots of things “mental.”
In today’s age of political correctness, I’m sure using that word in that way is considered a heinous act. After all, in NYC if you call a foreigner who’s in our country in contravention of our laws an “illegal alien” you could be fined $250,000. No, that’s not an exaggeration. Tell that foreigner-in-our-country-in-contravention-of-our-laws that you intend to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, and some Gotham judge could up the damage to a cool half-million. Apparently, it’s hate-speech.
So at no small personal risk to myself, I’m going to apply the un-PC, unkind term from my youth to the loony Luddites who protested at the coal-fired electric power plant in Bow last month. They are the epitome of “mental.”
As daylight hours shorten and daily high temperatures drop, count me among those who are happy that we benefit from a strong, reliable power grid fueled for the most part by fossil fuels – the only fuels other than nuclear capable of sustaining a modern power distribution system.
The protesters’ stated goal was to shut down the coal-fired power plant, one of the last such plants in New England. As reported by WMUR, Sam Tardiff of 350 NH Action/NH Youth Movement put forth what might pass for wisdom or received knowledge in his circle, but to anyone who values logic and reason it’s a non sequitur: “The time has come. It’s 2019. We shouldn’t be burning coal anymore.”
It’s 2019; we shouldn’t be graduating functional illiterates and innumerates from our high schools and then sending some of them off to college. It’s 2019, the United States shouldn’t be the 12th most obese nation in the world. It’s 2019; we shouldn’t be dealing with the return of medieval diseases in the feces-strewn homeless encampments of our major Democrat-led cities. See how that works? The calendar year is just a date; it has nothing to do with the reality of our situation.
What is our reality when it comes to generating and distributing the power required to live an advanced economy? To start, we need electricity, preferably plentiful, reliable, and cheap. We want it to be produced as cleanly and unobtrusively as possible, and from domestic resources. Energy independence is important to those of us old enough to remember the lines and skyrocketing prices for gasoline in the early 1970s. We don’t want to be held hostage ever again to the whims of foreign governments for a foundational piece of our economy. Young Sam Tardiff, a UNH undergrad, didn’t live through those times and probably knows little about it.
(Protesting is easy when you don’t have context.)
And oh-by-the-way: It’s 2019 and CO2 emissions from electric power generation are at the lowest point since 1984, while we consume nearly a third more electricity. Over this time, so-called “renewables” have been a tiny, unreliable part of the grid. Until – or if – there’s a technologic breakthrough, “renewables” will never be more than marginal players on our electric grid.
While coal may soon go the way of the dodo, it will do so because of market forces, not mindless protests. As professor Mark Perry wrote at his American Enterprise Institute blog, “So at the same time that climate alarmists like Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez lecture us about reducing our carbon footprint to prevent a pending environmental collapse, carbon emissions in the US have fallen to a level not seen since before AOC was born in 1989. And that reduction in CO2 is largely due to free-market capitalism that brought us the advanced technologies of fracking and horizontal drilling that accessed oceans of affordable shale gas.”
The irony is that fossil fuels – so hated by modern “environmentalists” – provide reliable, affordable energy, and market capitalism – so hated by modern “environmentalists” – has reduced our CO2 footprint without subsuming our national autonomy to international treaties and foreign bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, the environmental movement continues to beclown itself. A few weeks ago, Campus Reform reported that Bates college in Maine is looking for applicants for an Environmental Studies professorship. Qualified applicants should be prepared to conduct research in areas such as “ecocriticism and nature writing,” “queer ecologies,” “indigenous and post-colonial/decolonial/decolonizing environmentalisms,” “ecofeminism/feminist environmentalism,” and “posthumanism and animal studies.”
Sure, let’s trust the direction of our life-sustaining power grid to mentals like that.

Ken Gorrell welcomes your comments at kengorrell@gmail.com