“I’m going to miss Matthew Good,” Ezra Levant writes. “For those who aren’t part of Generation X, Good is a Vancouver pop star, scheduled to come out with a new album later this month. But Monday on his Facebook page, he made a stunning announcement: He is against electricity:”
Good’s website’s home page is a gorgeous photo of a concert stage — bathed in dazzling spotlights. His blog details the dozens of cities he has travelled to for concerts. The man has the carbon footprint of a small village. Yet he condemns electrical power.
Good’s fatuous claims about mankind’s glorious past before electricity aren’t just a jarring contrast to his own high-powered lifestyle. They’re also factually false.
AdvertisementBefore electricity, mankind’s state of affairs was bleak. Life expectancy 200 years ago was just 35. Good is 39 years old and should think about that.
Life wasn’t just shorter. It was brutal, and grindingly poor. It’s not hard to imagine. Just look at those parts of the world today without power — over a billion people have to cook their dinners on an open flame. There’s not a lot of room for pop music in the world’s most excruciatingly poor countries. They’re too busy trying to survive.
It must be tough for pop stars to reconcile their hedonistic, materialistic, high-carbon lifestyles with liberal cliches like “reduce, reuse and recycle.”
Other showbiz types such as Al Gore and James Cameron just bluff it out, and hope we’re too starstruck to notice the chasm between what they preach and what they practise.
Maybe Good will prove his skeptics wrong. Let’s see if his album will be called: “Matthew Good Unplugged” — a live album from Pyongyang.
Beyond putting on concerts bathed in electric lights, playing electric instruments powered by electric amplification, why is someone who is publicly against electricity on the Internet in the first place?
why is someone who is publicly against electricity on the Internet in the first place?
Stupidity, brainlessness?
The burning (pardon me) question is: Just what energy sources are acceptable to the Green guys? It seem that they don’t like nuclear, natural gas, shale gas, fracked gas, hydro, oil, coal, switchgrass, or even french-fry oil. That leaves wind power, solar-cells, ethanol, and hydro-thermal.
Hydro-thermal is inconvenient unless you live in Iceland or within 10 miles of a volcano. Solar and wind have been opposed in most places they have been tried, but they seem to be what remains. Ethanol is popular, because it buys electoral votes in the midwest.
The current line is that we will just have to live with the clean power that is available. Possibly, with some extra allowances for those who are doing the heavy lifting of planning for our sustainable, heavily subsidized, if boring future.
Less Electricity = Smarter Living
(See the link at top-right)
Fred: They’re predicting a blackout at 7:00.
Jane: I’ll heat dinner now and we can eat by flashlight. Are the batteries charged?
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[edited] Steve Holliday is the CEO of National Grid. He predicts less access to electricity as the UK uses more wind-generated power. Blackouts could be a part of power systems that replace reliable coal plants with wind turbines. Wind power is necessary to meet government requirements, but it will require lifestyle changes.
He means that the UK will get a barely functional, hideously expensive, Third World power grid.
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