Wednesday, February 22, 2012

I was Green before Global Warming was Cool

I grew up in the 60s, when the environmental movement was getting started.  There was no talk of global warming, then.  Just people wanting to breathe clean air and drink clean water.  We wanted alternative sources of energy because the by-products of oil and coal were thought to be potentially hazardous to our health.  And then came the Yom Kippur War in '73, followed by the OPEC embargo, and the price of gas shot up -- to 65 cents per gallon!  So then it made even more sense to find alternative sources of energy, so we weren't dependent upon Middle Eastern oil.

So when people started talking about needing to go green because of global warming (I think that started in the 80s), I thought, "Uh...okay, I guess that's another good reason to go green."

So I look at people screaming and yelling at each other about global warming and I shrug my shoulders and wonder what all the fighting is about.  Don't we want to go green, anyway, regardless of global warming?

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