What some people won't do to save energy

Hillary Clinton gave a speech at the National Press Club about energy on Tuesday.

It was the usual wide-eyed call for efficiency and conservation and reducing our dependence on foreign oil, plus a proposal to slap an extra tax on the only people who actually know how to get the stuff out of the ground and into your engines and appliances.

Here are a couple of ideas to save energy that Senator Clinton didn't mention.

Eliminate cross-town school busing for racial integration. In Los Angeles, nobody ever talks about how much fuel is used to drive children thirty miles from one majority-Hispanic public school to another, or why it's worth the fuel cost--not to mention the cost of the drivers, the equipment, the maintenance and the insurance--to do it.

Eliminate curbside recycling programs. For the dubious goal of reducing landfill volume, giant fuel-sucking trucks drive up one side of the street and down the other across American cities every week, picking up barrels of unsorted recyclables so they can be put through a fuel-sucking manufacturing process that pollutes the air and water and increases the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.

Wouldn't our energy and money be better spent educating kids in the schools close to their homes and paying a premium for landfill space? Shouldn't we at least run the numbers and make an informed decision?

Ask your favorite candidates. Watch them go pale under their suntans.

They're so quick to criticize your decisions about energy use. How rational are theirs?

By the way, Senator Clinton told the National Press Club that we are watching "as the Earth warms faster than it has at any time in the past 200,000 years." That's in case you thought being married to Bill Clinton didn't age you.


Copyright 2006


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