I Ain't Green, I'm poor

To the extent that all these innovations save me money, I'm all for 'em. Been using programmable thermostats since Einstein was a puppy. Makes sense, right? Compact flourscents make sense, when they live up to the advertising, and they don't.

My current experience gives a defective product rate of close to 40%. That's failure within 100 hours of use. Sure they can be returned, but that takes more in gas than I would have saved by using the damn things had they worked, A net loss, if you ask me. Plus the additional costs of dealing with more hazmat disposal (we're talking mercury, Hg, here) tells me that someone was thinking short term here and hadn't thought things through.

Now these vehicular standards really get up my left nostril. Ethanol as fuel is just plain stupid. It takes foodstuffs which are expensive enough to produce and turns them into automotive juice. Just what I always dreamed of - a car that runs on whiskey! Well, the lubricants and hydraulic fluids can't be replaced with the materials that once fed humans and domesticated animals. Those well meaning idiots (read as "stupid shitheads in hock to ADM") figured that starving lots of people was of minor importance as opposed to saving the world from Nuclear Winter/Global Warming/Climate Change/The Weather. As if the world's climate was to be defined as the current condition, and that the current condition was optimal. "When confronted with Man's stupidity, the Gods themselves cry in vain. That's Schiller, if I remember correctly, and it takes a heavy load for me to quote a furriner.

Now let's pile Stupid upon Idiotic, and talk about electric cars. Electricity is a "clean fuel", right? Bull Shit. Electricity is produced by transforming mechanical of thermal energy into a flow of fun loving electrons whose only desire is to make your very own personal life just so much better and better.

Wrong! Electrons are free marketeers, looking for the path of least resistance to a ground, and if that goes through your body they will kill you. Great sources of stored energy are required to liberate these liberty loving fools, and the most profitable way of doing so is to burn stuff. ZOMG!!!11ELEVENTY11!

No shit. Electricity is not generated from the mind of Zeus to be liberated like Athenae with a single blow. No, it requires generating plants capturing the power of Vulcan (the god with dirty fingernails) to liberate the energy held captive in coal, gas, enslaved waterways, and rare minerals which give up their last in atomic reactions.

Electric power is a standard. I'll admit that. But pretending that electric cars are "emissions free" is the most obvious form of willful blindness.

Run the numbers. Gs heating is about half the cost of electric, even in the frozen North where it has to be delivered; because they're too stupid to avoid things like bitter winters, straight roads, and level ground.

Think it through, folks! Burn stuff to generate heat to generate electricity to send through lines to be turned back into heat? (Thank God for Tesle, otherwise we would be stuck with Edison's generating plants every mile of power line.) It's bleeding obvious, innit?

TANSTAAFL. Learn it. Live it. You really don't have a choice