Patrice Lewis is one of my favorite writers. She doesn’t necessarily deal with Green issues, but her basic common sense and clear intellectual instincts lends itself to extrapolating the consequences of 'going green' by the thoughts she expressed in, "The end of the world as we know it".
Patrice's article actually deals with something that has been in the news the last few days, “the possibility of either a massive solar flare or EMP taking down the electrical grid in this country. "Patrice imagines American life without the electrical grid", which is what the greenies tout.
Forget about all their clamoring about alternative energy because they only supported that when there wasn't any. Once some poor fool of a businessman, who thought the greenies were just swell guys and gals, started actually implementing programs such as solar energy, wind energy and bio-fuels they found out just how insane the green movement really is. They (I use the word 'they' loosely because there is no command and control structure) will then turn on that man like a rabid dog, no matter what other groups support him, and the media will eat it up.
‘They’ have hated coal, oil and nuclear forever. Now they hate natural gas, solar, wind, hydroelectric, bio-fuel; all stuff the loved before it became reality. They would also hate anything else someone can actually turn into reality. They hate electricity because it allows us to have advanced societies versus ‘pastoral’ communities living in ‘harmony’ with nature; and what a load of horsepucky that is.
Patrice notes;
“Disturbingly, there are some people who actually jeer at the thought of a darkened nation. “People … stop worrying,” one person scolded. “We had none of these luxuries in the early 1900s and late 1800s and before, yet people still lived and had lives. You want to survive, learn how to live like billions of people did before 1900.”However this point seems to be missed. How many billions, and how long before 1900? At the end of WWII the world’s population totaled about two billion people, with an average life span of around 65 years; notice how lives improved with technology? It took thousands of years for the world to reach that number, yet in less than 75 years the world’s population soared to seven billion people. Let’s get this right; living like people before 1900 meant have a life span of less than 48 years….in the United States….the rest of the world took time to get that far. And as you go further back in time it meant really “being in harmony with nature”, and living in misery, squalor, sickness, suffering and early death. That’s what it meant in all the centuries past, and that is what it would happen now.
The result then was dystopia; and now it would only be worse. Why would it be worse? Patrice goes on to note that;
“There seems to be a quaint fallacy that, should America lose its electrical grid, we would merely regress to the 1800s. Nonsense. We’d regress a whole lot farther back than that. If we’re lucky, we’d only regress back to the Middle Ages. Not in social structure, but in terms of primitive survival.”
She later says; The loss of our power grid will not put us back to the pioneers – it may well put us back to the Middles Ages or earlier, but without the survival skills the peasants had back then."Many years ago I used to give a once a year all day seminar at one of my accounts; the science department of a high school. I commented that if we were to go “back to nature” the vast majority of them would be dead in a year or less. They…being young and oh so sure of themselves… laughed at such foolishness. After all; weren’t they the brightest, smartest and best generation the world had known? Having grown up on a farm I knew things they had never heard of, as an example; how do you preserve meats, fruits and vegetables without canning jars? For that matter; how do you grow those things? We, in developed nations, live in a complex interlocking society. We don’t have land, animals, tools or the knowledge to care for ourselves outside of who and what we are in our daily lives based on rules that don’t require us to have those things or know about using them. Yet that is the support system that keeps us alive, happy and secure. Take that away and we die.
The kids all decided I was wrong because they would merely learn how to do those things. I said…. “really”? I further intoned; “Just how long do you think that would take? Then once you learned would there be enough time left to grow the food needed to keep from starving. And how long do you think you can survive until you do learn and implement that learning?”
Patrice outlines just how difficult life without modern conveniences would be…for those who already have tools and knowledge by saying;
But what would happen if the electrical grid went down? If the farmer could no longer buy fuel for his tractor, mower, swather, baler or hay truck? If he couldn’t obtain the twine that binds the hay into convenient bales? If the parts he needed for his frequent breakdowns were unavailable?We need to understand that the green movement is irrational and misanthropic. The most radical among them believe mankind is a virus that must be eliminated. The more moderate of them only want to eliminate a mere four to five billion people. So do you now understand why they really are against any form of power generation?
What would happen is my husband, children and I would be out in the hot sun swinging scythes (yes, we have four scythes in the barn) to cut that hay. It would take about two weeks of long days to “mow” the field. Then we’d have to rake the hay by hand. Then we’d have to somehow transport 15 tons of loose grass hay the quarter-mile to our barn, where we’d have to pitch the unbaled hay to the rafters.
In short, a job which takes only a few days with modern conveniences would take several weeks of brutal work without electricity. And we’re among the lucky ones. We already have a farm, scythes, sharpeners, a barn, livestock, physical fitness and a willing spirit.
They always claim their motives behind their actions are “for the children”, yet everything they propose ends up being "to the children", not "for the children", since the children are the one who ultimately suffer the most. Remember those life span figures? Why did people live such short lives? They didn’t! People have always lived into their 80’s, only not many did so. The biggest reason for shorted “average life spans” is the fact that those figures were “averaged”. My grandmother had seven children and lost two as infants to pneumonia. The others lived to be 47, 79, 80, 81, and one is still alive. So for those six the average was about 41 years, yet the ‘typical’ life span was around 80. Two children dying before age one dropped the average significantly. That is what ‘being one with nature’ means, short lives for large numbers of children. That is why it took so long for the world population to hit two billion. Just the number the ‘moderate’ greenies want, only without electricity I believe that number would drop even lower, and very rapidly.
So now would someone please explain to me why I shouldn’t think the entire green movement is insane?
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If you worked in an industry that involved heavy labor, like construction, or farming, you would know why people rarely lived to 80. The work wears people out. People who work in the field into their 60s in construction often look like they are in their 70s.
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