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:: MAX BLACK ::

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C.S. Lewis

"The Swiss pocket knife of conservative thought on the web..." - Eli Kardrakian

"Bookmark Max and dump your subscription to the newspaper; if you don't have a birdcage you really don't need it anyway..." - Shirley St. James

:: Sunday, May 23, 2004 ::

True Story:

I have this friend who was, at one time, head of sales and marketing for a big regional utility. Over a couple of beers, we had a conversation about global warming and he was lamenting the fact that to create electrical energy, massive amounts of coal are required. He described the near continuous streams of rail-cars loaded with coal that coal-fired plants burn, day-in-day-out, to generate enough power for an average sized city. He told me about the vast strip-pits where they mine the coal. He told me about the 120 million metric tons of the fly-ash by-product of coal burning and the resultant caustic slurry pits 'as far as the eye could see'. He told me about the C02 emmisions from coal-fired power plants that scientists think cause changes in our atmosphere. 'All in all' he said, 'coal-fired plants are just an environmental nightmare'.

Then he told me about nucear power generation. He told me that someday, he would take me fishing in one of the ponds at a nuclear plant. He said that the water in the cooling ponds was completely safe and that you could drink it (if you weren't too concerned about the normal bacteria found in any pond). He told me that nuclear power produces almost no C02 emissions.

This story is interesting only because my friend is a very well-connected liberal. Several years after we had this conversation, my friend resigned his lucrative position because he was so opposed to the environmental consequences of coal-burning power plants. He told me nuclear power was our only hope.

Interestingly, this environmentalist seems to agree.

:: Max 8:50 PM [+] ::
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