Once in a while a pundit will say something quite revealing without intending to do so. You’d think a newspaper in a state that was recently looking down the barrel of a 72 percent electric rate hike might have beamed onto the fact that power doesn’t come from wishes, and often requires difficult choices:
During a week filled with concerns about protecting the environment comes the alarming news that state officials are considering exploiting one resource to develop another.
As reported by The Sun‘s Tom Pelton, the O’Malley administration is weighing a request from Pennsylvania developers to lease and clear-cut 400 mountaintop acres in two state forests in Western Maryland so they can erect 100 wind turbines, 40 stories tall, to supply clean power to just 55,000 homes …
"Sput, sput, sput!" they sputter. "The governor’s job is to provide free lunches to all, along with cheap, clean power and no pollution, and above all no trade-offs, ever."
(I’d say the writer’s implicit statement of belief in free lunches — in having goods and services that magically appear without the need for exploiting anything or anyone — is the real root cause of many of our most vexing environmental problems. But of course discussions about limits and trade-offs isn’t very popular in ad-supported media at any time, particularly around the SaleAbration of the Christ’s Birth Shopping Season that dominates right now.)
