Opponents of Clean Energy Never Think They Sound Crazy

Over at Time's Swampland blog, Massimo Calabresi spends hundreds of words goofily mocking clean energy, including a Foghorn Leghorn reference (really). Calabresi simultaneously claims that wind power doesn't employ enough people to be considered anything more than a "fantasy" AND that it employs so many people as to be "totally unscalable." See? Whether the wind power industry adds jobs or loses jobs, it proves his point! This is how you get to be a Beltway Insider Journalist.

That's right! Calabresi isn't an opinion columnist - he's Time's Washington correspondent. Can you imagine the demands for Calabresi to resign if he'd similarly bashed coal?

But at the end of the article, there's one sentence that pushes this article past Tired Conventional Wisdom and into Colbert-esque self-parody:

I'm all for innovation and believe in government investments to fuel it.

It may be the least self-conscious statement I've ever read. Look, just because I spent this entire column bashing innovation and government investments to fuel it doesn't mean I'm some mindless shill for our outdated, failed energy policies! Clearly I am a forward thinker, because I just said so!

Worst Earth Day Post Ever

I got nothin'. I blog about the environment 365 days a year. Why make a big deal out of one? Does that mean everyone can ignore the Earth the other 364?

OK, I do have one little thing. Have you seen the cover of TIME magazine's environment issue? Doesn't it look like they're putting up one of those cell phone towers made up to look like a tree? Wouldn't it have fit the image much better and been more 21st-century to have them putting up a wind power generator?

And for the most creative skewering of President Bush's inaction on global warming I've ever seen, you have to read The Fat Bush Theory.

UPDATE 1:53PM: Even more annoying than declarations that Earth Day will save the planet -- pretentious declarations that Earth Day was like SOOO much better back in the day, and now it's all ruined and commercialized.