The road to greenie Hell is paved with good intentions
Bookworm on Apr 09 2011 at 6:07 pm | Filed under: Climate change
To get from my house to the freeway, one needs to drive down a fairly well traveled four lane access road (two lanes in each direction) that’s a little over a mile long. The speed limit on the road varies between 30 and 35 miles an hour. There are three short traffic lights. If you’re lucky, you can miss all three of them. Normally, it takes me about 3-4 minutes to drive down this road.
Yesterday, though, when I left the house early to get to my computer repair technician, I unexpectedly found myself in a traffic jam. Traffic was backed up for about a half mile. The reason was quickly obvious — one of the two freeway bound lanes was closed. The 3-4 minute trip took ten minutes at stop-and-go speed. I could see my fuel gauge fall by the second. This driving was not optimum efficiency driving for either my traditional minivan or the Prius in front of me.
What’s amusing, in a perverse way, was the reason for the lane closure. As part of a green initiative, a nearby school had designated Friday as “walk to school day.” Because small children were involved, this involved hiring police officers to protect them from traffic and closing off the lane. When I drove up, about 10 little kids were trotting along the sidewalk with their parents and, to their right, there was an empty lane to further insulate them from traffic dangers. In the remaining lane, there were dozens of cars, spewing fumes.
I suspect the irony of the whole thing was lost on the participants, who were no doubt quite proud of their commitment to the environment as demonstrated by a short walk through a long exhaust-laden fog.
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9 Responses to “The road to greenie Hell is paved with good intentions”
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They intend to create more pollution in order to accrue and demand more political power, in order to dictate more of such initiaties, leading to more pollution.
Wait, they encourage kids to walk to school but it requires shutting down half the road on that side. Well, I’m sure everyone hopes this idea takes off. But I assume the city would put the kibosh on kids walking to school often since it would require a complete rework of the roads.
I also wonder how many of those students really could walk to school – I’ll bet that most of them had their mothers parked somewhere around the block and they were simply walking to their car parked in the local neighborhood rather than parked at the school.
It kind of reminds me of Mike “Nannystate” bloomberg, mayor of NYC - he takes the subway to work; except that they have a convoy of cars take him to the subway and then the convoy picks him up from the subway later; after he has done his “subway photo tour.”
To really walk to school, given the number of miles involved, they would have to wake up at like 5 am.
Who really woke up at 5 am. The time figures break down this way. For every 30 minutes spent walking, it takes about 5 minutes of driving on non-highways.
If it took 15 minutes to 30 minutes to get to school on bus, via the highway, that would mean they would have had to walk six times that in time, at the very least.
You could rename the state of California “Irony,” and they wouldn’t get it.
Completely typical of the results of liberal mindset — posturing beats reality every single time.
Has everyone seen the comprehensive devastation of the “windpower dream” by the reality? Data please…..
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/07/wind_power_actually_25_per_cent/
Earl – “Completely typical of the results of liberal mindset — posturing beats reality every single time.”
Yes, I once had a co-worker (very liberal, you know the kind that called Bush a cowboy, “even the Europeans hate him” mindset) who would buy her morning coffee at the coffee shop downstairs in the lobby (wouldn’t be caught dead drinking the “free” stuff the company provided as that was “beneath” her.) Then she would bring the coffee upstairs in the styrofoam cup and then proceed to pour it into her ceramic mug; then throw away the styrofoam cup.
When I asked her why she did this; she explained that she hated styrofoam because it was “bad for the environment” and that the ceramic mug was a greener choice. When I pointed out that she still used the styrofoam cup, adding to the landfill, and now she had to wash a mug, adding more waste water to the water filtration plant. Her response? “You just don’t get it, if we don’t do someting about the environment it won’t be there for our kids!”
To which I can only say:
non-pedestrian coffee – $3.95
Styrofoam cup in the landfill and more waste water down the drain – $1.95
Mindless Liberal postering – priceless
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