As a young musician playing in a band I remember being told that “less is more”. In other words, it wasn’t the quantity, but the quality of what you were playing that was important. I’m sure there are other analogies, but generally speaking, from a mathematical standpoint, less can’t be more, or it wouldn’t be “less” in the first place. My head hurts.
And your head will hurt, too, if you keep reading. In Portland, Maine, businesses are outraged that after having been regulated into using less electricity, to diminish their corporate “carbon footprint”, they found themselves in a different rate group with their providers and ultimately were paying more money for less electricity. Ouch! Talk about cruel irony. It’s hard to imagine that in this dire time for the economy, when most businesses are struggling to remain afloat, that having to pay a higher electric bill for less product would be met with much enthusiasm. And it wasn’t.
I’ve written before that I believe a cleaner planet is a better planet. I believe, pragmatically, that it is not beyond belief that “man” has impacted the environment negatively. Just the burning of fossil fuels over the last hundred or so years, at such an enormous rate, could plausibly, in my humble opinion, have some detrimental effect to our environment. Call me a nut.
However I don’t buy into the global warming hysteria, nor do I subscribe to any political affiliation that demands I adhere to a pre-determined position. I don’t believe the argument is strengthened either way when it becomes a political football. Political footballs don’t move, they hover. Nothing ever gets agreed upon, and consequently solutions are rarely manifest.
The case in Maine, though, demonstrates how knee-jerk policy often comes back to bite you in the buttocks. It reminds us how the electric companies weren’t born yesterday, and are already anticipating ways to maintain revenue levels in a world where everyone is being told to “use less”. There isn’t a father or husband in the world, including me, who is not well versed in the flamingo-like dance of running around the house turning lights out behind other occupants who are less familiar with the electric bill. Still, on a global level, solid solutions come from reasoned thought that already considered things like “rate groups” and “unintended consequences”.
Another example of bitten buttocks comes in the form of the increasingly popular LED traffic signals. They look nice. They are brighter and use much less electricity to operate than the old-fashioned traffic lights. They also don’t emit any heat, like a regular bulb, and this created problems in parts of the country where snow and ice are part of the weather menu. During snow storms, the lights became covered with snow and ice and completely ineffectual. So, in many towns and states that found themselves with these lights at hundreds of intersections, public works and highway crews were forced to go around to these lights during bad weather, and thaw them out with heaters from a bucket truck. In some areas, they installed small make-shift heaters to keep the lights from icing over. In other places, they undertook the more (though not much more) humiliating task of replacing the units altogether with…you guessed it…the old ones. Consider the energy wasted, the muddy “carbon footprint”, as a result of hundreds of utility trucks and crews having to be dispatched to “thaw traffic lights” every time there was inclement weather and the temperature was below freezing. What’s the old saying about cutting off your nose?
There is something to be learned here and most of us learned it in kindergarten. Someone wrote a story about it involving a tortoise and a hare. I’m not sure that book is still available, or if PETA has had it removed from libraries as it depicts turtles as slow-moving, but smart, and rabbits as fast, but not all that bright. From a pet’s standpoint, it uses the worst stereotypes imaginable, but if you can find a copy it’s worth the read if only for the valuable lesson. And read it slowly. Haste makes waste.