Wow! Gas for just $.05 per gallon!

Originally posted by Troubleshooter


AH! GODDAMN HIPPIES!!!

Ok, got that out of my system.

Now, we have some real problems here in America with confusing, contradictory and conciliatory environmental policy.

For instance, it's one of the reasons for California's energy crisis. They can't build any of the newer, much more efficient and clean power plants because of environmental restrictions. The new natural gas burning plants are far and above superior to the coal plants that they have now.

No, they just build them in Colorado. We have the 4-corners power plant which pollutes the air in every direction, and outside the teeny town of Nucla, Colorado, we have the ever popular Tri-state power plant, also a real polluter, as well as a major road hazard since the thing is supplied by a never-ending stream of coal trucks which drive over the trecherous mountain roads and hair pin curves at a gazillion miles an hour. Nothing like trying to negotiate Norwood "Hill" - a very steep pass with few guard rails on an icey winter day and see one of these coal trucks bearing down on you in your rear view. The energy these plants produce go straight to LA, as the direction of the power lines attest. The population out there (about 1 per square mile - and the Navajo don't count since most don't have electrified hogans) hardly requires the massive electrical output of these two monsters, and the utility lines from them head west to California, not east to Denver. I shed no tears for California, and the state is hardly hamstrung by enviromental restrictions. They've just put their power plants in areas where the population is too small and too disenfranchised to protest.

Yes, I am a bona fide, "tree-hugging" hippie, and the reason I am is because I spent 6 years studying biology at the graduate and post graduate level. Most people who complain about environmental restrictions are so ignorant of science that they wouldn't know the 1st law of thermodynamics if it hit them with a stick.