• Home
• About
• Contact
• RSS

Yes! We Have No Bananas!

April 20th, 2006 | View Comments

So the energy issue has has hit the mainstream again, with varying reactions. We have both the pro- [via Michelle at Andrew Sullivan] and anti-nuclear forces mustering, as well as the anti-wind and anti-everything else forces.

This sort of thing reminds me of something that I heard Chancellor Wiley of the University of Wisconsin say a while back, that extreme environmentalists may wind up indirectly causing more environmental damage than all the various energy sources they oppose.

These are the environmentalists that Anne Applebaum refers to as “BANANA-ists”–Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything environmentalists–in her column linked above.

Chancellor Wiley spent a long time trying to figure out the university’s power problem. See, the university is a giant energy hog and the existing power sources simply weren’t sufficient, especially during the summer. I remember there were times the university needed to do rolling air conditioning shutdowns in order to keep the critical systems supplied with power.

And lest anyone think I’m just being a whiner, that meant that in my building, temperatures could easily rise to around 100 degrees (being in Wisconsin, Land of the Frozen Tundra, buildings are designed to hold heat in) which was bad for people and even worse for computers. When they shut down the AC in my building, they also turned all the computers off and sent us home.

I don’t really remember the specifics of the solution he was trying to implement, but it involved building a power plant. He said he’d spent a lot of time trying to find as a clean a solution as possible, but the environmentalists came out and protested the solution anyways.

And because the only people who bothered to attend the various public meetings about the power plant were the people who had a problem with it, the environmentalists managed to stall the process for a period of years, to the point where the energy problem on campus was starting to be critical (see above paragraph).

He believed that if the energy problem was allowed to go on with no resolution, the following things would happen: The average person would get angry. The average person would start going to those public meetings.

And the average person would vote to authorize not the environmentally cleanest solution, but whatever solution would get their power back on the most quickly. And that was probably going to be some nasty, smoke-spewing, coal thing. So instead of the relatively clean solution that Madison could have had, it was going to wind up with a giant polluting mess.

I graduated shortly after I heard him talk about this, so I have no idea what came of it.

But it’s something worth thinking about.

Yvonne posted this on April 20th, 2006 @ 7:52pm in News/Politics, Wisconsin | Permalink to "Yes! We Have No Bananas!"

2 Comments

Keep track of the discussion! Subscribe to this post's RSS feed.

Have something to say? Leave your own comment!
| Trackback |

Enter search keywords:

| Back to Top |