Feeding the Fat Green Pigs

In an article dripping with irony, energy history and the environment are chronicled over the last two centuries. Here are key excerpts:

In the era before coal, oil, and electricity, the environment suffered greatly.
Whales were slaughtered for lamp oil. Forests were cleared for firewood, mine props, building materials, roofing shingles, and sailing masts. London ("The Big Smoke") and Pittsburgh ("The Smoky City") were smothered in smog from open fires, charcoal kilns, and iron smelters. Horses powered public and military transport, and city streets were layered with horse manure.

Then came the hydrocarbon revolution. Kerosene lamps saved the whales, and coal-powered steam engines delivered electricity (clean-coal-by-wire) to the cities — and much of the sulfurous smog disappeared. Coke from coal replaced wood charcoal to make iron and steel. Steel and concrete saved the forests, and trucks and railways allowed the farmland, which once fed millions of horses, to produce food for humans.

A key event occurred in 2006, when a leading left-wing politician, Al Gore, invented the Global Warming Industry. Despite a finding by a British High Court judge that his movie An Inconvenient Truth contained nine key scientific errors, it is still shown in schools. This has misled students and teachers and created spreading circles of damage to jobs, industry, and the cost and reliability of electricity. It also created the fake industries of climate hysteria and green activism.

Land that once fed horses is now used to produce biodiesel and ethanol for cars, so food prices must go up. Forests are felled to burn in green power stations and for green-tick buildings while grasslands are invaded by feral pests and woody weeds from the ever growing parks and Kyoto Protocol forests. Birds and bats are being sliced by wind turbines; flatlands are being smothered by solar panels, access roads and transmission lines. But electricity costs soar, and supply is rationed while reliability crashes.

And now we have come full circle with the fat green pigs that feed on green energy and environmentalism are getting richer and richer while the average citizen's standard of living declines as the price of energy increases and reliability decreases.