The Lessons of Winter

Politicians can get elected with scare tactics on nuclear power and fairy tales about solar energy; but when the chips and the temperature are down, there are only two effective sources: coal and nuclear, and not enough of either.

Congressional regulators and income-distributors can bamboozle the gullible with talk about consumer protection; but when the chips and the gas pressure are down, they know the remedy: Off with price controls, and government bureaucracy out of the way.

Nader's Corporations can preach that nuclear power is unreliable and unnecessary; but when the chips are down and the coal piles frozen, nuclear power bails out half the country.

The US is on an energy binge, small is beautiful, jobs is one thing and energy another, say the Friends of the Earth and of the Sierra Club. That is exactly what the two million energy pigs, now unemployed because of the gas shortage, always needed to be told.

The force of reality is stronger than the gospel of the drivelers.

And yet they drivel on. We have received, from friends who must remain anonymous, Primer for Living, the bible of the well-heeled Creative Iniatitive Foundation, which teaches "God did not make plutonium, therefore it is evil;" through its political arm, Project Survival, it works against the common man enjoying the same freedoms as its members, largely drawn from the ranks of affluent professionals. Their gospel is in part deceptively humanitarian, in part totalitarian, but always anti-technological and always megalomanic. We consider it important enough to return to it in a future issue.

In the meantime, we can take heart in the certainty that this type of bogus-religious rubbish, whatever temporary headway it may make, must eventually rot into oblivion. The force of reality is stronger than the moronic mumblings of megalomaniac mini-Messiahs.