Saturday, May 16, 2015

On the Demonizing of Fossil Fuels

It's really gotta stop. If it wasn't for the discovery and utilization of fossil fuels, we would all still be residing on farms, riding around on horses and buggies (shoveling the shit all day long), cutting down trees like they were going out of style, choking on the smoke from wood stoves, killing whales en masse (possibly to the point of extinction) for use in lanterns, and croaking before the age of 40. Yes, there are down-sides to fossil fuels (coal more so than oil and natural gas) but to say that they're killing more people than they're saving is a full-bore absurdity and precisely why developing countries are intelligently (even Hillary Clinton has said that this is the proper course of action) using it going forward.........................................................................................................P.S. Here is the entire quote from Hillary (excerpted from a business round-table in Pakistan, 2009) - "So getting the resources to exploit your coal as opposed to being dependent upon imported energy is a choice for you to make, but it is certainly a choice that your neighbors have made. And that's something that should attract foreign investment and should attract capital investment within your own country. And we don't know how we're going to proceed on the climate change issue. We're working hard to come to some framework before Copenhagen, but coal will be, for the foreseeable future, part of the energy mix. And if you have these kinds of reserves, you should seek the best and cleanest technology for their extraction and their use going forward."

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