Oh, how I laughed out loud when I read this. The Onion is such fun.
“I know you’ve been really excited about helping us ever since that whole ‘Save the Whales’ craze began back in the ’70s,” the whale said. “But I think we can agree that the past 35 years have basically been a death march, so let’s just part ways.”
“We had a good run,” added the creature, who requires 1.5 million calories each day to survive. “But species come and go. It’s a natural cycle and we are at peace with it.”
The consortium of blue whales admitted they had begun beaching themselves on purpose, and ordered the environmentalists to stop wasting time organizing volunteers who only prevent the suicidal creatures from experiencing the sweet release of death. They also urged the activists to end their practice of collecting signatures for petitions and to put their efforts into something that has a chance of succeeding, such as saving historic buildings.
I just don’t read the Onion enough, apparently. I need to make it a habit.
Children of the Corn? Give me a break, kids.
And jimmy carter was a nuclear power officer in the Navy under Hyman Rickover. So his pushing of alternative forms of energy as viable is a bit of a lark. He was in the field that is the only readily available “alternative” form of so called renewable energy. Otherwise there is no such thing. There are possibly ways to increase efficiency but other than that most are just pipe dreams. And ethanol has caused the price of corn to rise to the point that it is not as large a food crop anymore.
@ glenn: I wasn’t defending ethanol: far from it. The reason for mentioning Children of the Corn was as a subtle way of demonstrating how persistent, like a bad horror movie villain, a bad idea like ethanol can be.
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Well Mark, there never is an end to enlightened thinking.
Do you mean ‘end’ as in rationale, or ‘end’ as in logical stopping-point? ;-) Or both?
@ Nicholas: Check out the film version of Children of the Corn – young couple terrorized by religious fundamentalists in the heartland, and they defeat the evil beast and the crazed sect with the remnants of an alternative energy program funded by Jimmy Carter and consigned to the dustbin of history by Ronald Reagan: ethanol.
Re: the “Save the Whales Craze began back in the seventies” – just finished reading the National Lampoon magazine collection on DVD-Rom, and the scary thing is, regarding ethanol, solar heating, electric cars, pretty much any issue you can name, that we’ve been debating all this stuff for almost forty years now. The names of the people involved change, but what was stupid then is pretty much stupid now.
It’s much worse than that. I’ve been involved in energy since Jimmy Carter’s “Moral Equivalent of War” and mode of the underlying technology goes back to the 1920s–particularly the big-scale technologies like coal gasification and liquefaction–which are, of course, off the table now because of “Demon CO2″ but are the only ones that could make a national difference. It’s forever ten-to-twenty years away.
@ Darrell: per my comments above, have you seen Children of the Corn? You might get a bitter laugh out of it;)
I thought that was a documentary from the “local, sustainable” people.
“Local, sustainable people” who have bought into wind turbines no doubt. I think it’s tragic on how this “technology” is being marketed to a gullible public as a viable replacement for coal, natural gas, and nuclear powered electrical plants.