This was a dopey high school cheer of my older brother’s and sister’s sporting days in high school. “Go bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Go bananas!” How lame. What does it mean? I much preferred, “Watermelon. Watermelon. Watermelon rind. Look at the scoreboard and see who’s behind. You! You! You! You!” This was always led by the rowdy crowd after the opposing team’s cheerleaders would do a dopey skit, like the banana thing.
One of the first posts I wrote was Renewable NIMBY, that people purport to be in favor of renewable energy unless they have to look at it or pay for it. In case you’ve been cryogenically frozen since the 1950s, NIMBY means “not in my back yard”. People really like renewable energy so long as somebody else pays for it and it’s installed in North Dakota, where not so incidentally citizens are experiencing a booming economy by exploiting energy production, mostly on private land.
Last week I became mentally unglued upon reading about environmentalists blocking a paper mill in Port Angeles, Washington, from using wood waste for its strong appetite for thermal energy (steam). Nippon Paper has reduced its fossil fuel consumption by 88% and virtually eliminated the need for petroleum since 2000. What a smashing success. This is beyond President Obama’s wildest dreams for clean energy, reducing carbon dioxide emissions and dependence on imported energy. Yet environmental groups including the Sierra Club are fighting to shut it down and send 200-plus decent people to the unemployment lines.
Do you consider yourself an environmentalist? If you’re like me, the answer is, yes but I’m not in the whacko, nut-job category like these Port Angeles protesters are.
Port Angeles is of interest to me as I have visited there several times and I like it. It’s the last substantial town on the Olympic Peninsula on the way to the Pacific Ocean. It sits at the base of the Olympic Mountains and rain forests and other fantastic natural beauteous places abound all within an easy day-trip. It has a fair amount of tourism, but also industry as well and real people. Like many other industrial cities along the northern tier of states, it is struggling, and this sort of whacko “environmentalism” makes up a good share of the decay.
And consider sustainability, for which I recently read a good definition [paraphrasing]: leave the environment in as good or better condition than you found it, for future generations. This Nippon case seems to be a poster child for this. There is much logging on the Olympic Peninsula, from a renewable resource – trees. They plant seedlings by the square mile growing into beautiful new forests absorbing tons of carbon dioxide. Nippon uses the remains of local waste rather than fossil fuel to operate its paper plant.
One local whacko, a psychologist which seems to speak for itself, says the biomass plant is for pure greed at the expense of public health. News alert: she has no idea what she is talking about. What would she prefer? Close the plant and landfill the logging waste? I can all but promise you the emissions from wood waste will have less impact than using any other reasonable energy source. It will not be like burning a pile of wet twigs and leaves like we used to for roasting hotdogs and burning our eyes out. It will be clean. It’s carbon neutral. Emissions are regulated by the EPA. Do you think the EPA, which puts carbon dioxide you are producing right now and every minute of the day in the threat category, is going to allow this or any other manufacturer to emit one billionth of the hazardous emissions required to give a mouse a headache? I’ll let you know when I think the EPA is getting too slack. That will happen when I return to earth as a Labrador retriever.
Some carpers on the same side of the political spectrum whine about greedy corporations sending jobs overseas. Hmm. I wonder how these Nippon-protesting whackos and their ridiculous protests play into this? Consider how far into nutland this is. At the UW-Madison, we just spent millions of dollars to convert a district steam plant from burning coal to biomass – the same sort of thing these people on the Olympic Peninsula are protesting. If it’s good enough for Madisonians, trust me, it’s good enough anywhere.
NIMBY in some precincts is giving way to BANANA – “build absolutely nothing anywhere, near anything”… by whining halfwits and cretins killing our society – WHACKOS©.
