Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Need more electrictiy? Build a freaking power plant!
So I saw a thing about rolling blackouts in Texas on the news this morning, and they were making much of the whole “this is the warmest it has ever been this early” routine, and I got to thinking about how peculiar it is that we tend to regard our current infrastructure as a good barometer of the natural world, and how really, it goes further than that, and we tend to think of where we are now in general as some sort of definition of the possible and the reasonable, and thus judge reality against our development, rather than judging ourselves with respect to reality, hence the focus on driving our own evolution backward instead of forward that seems to be the mark of the thought of the time in so, so many circles.
Also, it’s the sort of thought that keeps protesting that such and so is illegal without ever considering that maybe the law itself is a problem. The tragedy isn’t the weather; the tragedy is that we haven’t built enough generating capacity to keep up with it. And if you truly believe that it’s the generating capacity fucking up the weather, then design something less polluting, already, and/or shut up.