Small “Carbon Footprint” = Poverty

So, the Freep is excited because Detroit scores well in the center-left Brookings Institute’s ranking of urban “carbon footprints.”

 

 Rougblog makes spells out in more detail what’s behind Detroit’s “achievement”:

 ”As a matter of fact, dead people exhale smaller amounts of carbon than live ones do. It’s sort of the same thing with cities. Abandoned factories use less energy than thriving ones. Cities where so many people are out of work don’t drive as much. No wonder Detroit’s carbon footprint is so small. It is the footprint of a withering shell.”

Hey Freep – the way things are going in Detroit and Michigan we’ll be approaching pre-Colombian levels in just a few generations!

 

Of course, that can be tough on the natives. As a the blog of a Western Michigan University conservative student organization aptly put it, “Recently, there has been an increasing push to impoverish Americans, under the guise of conservation. (For example), a recent ‘public service’ advertisement suggested that listeners ‘just turn out the lights.’ Do they have any idea how much toil and tribulation it took for mankind to turn on the lights? What a monumental achievement it was?”

 

Um, I have some idea – but clearly the “turn out the lights crowd” do not. Or to be more precise, the leaders of that crowd sneer at the accomplishment, because it’s just one part of the industrial civilization that they hate so passionately, and are working so earnestly to destroy, notwithstanding the previously unimaginable improvements in human well being it has generated.

 

Hat tip to Mark Perry for turning me on to the following cartoon from Wondermark, which captures all this with poignant (and pointed) eloquence:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s hard to read – go to the original here.

 

Tags: energy, environment