Do-It-Yourself Energy Policy

I haven’t got a lot of energy, haven’t for a while. You might say I’m a trend-setter.
Not that I know anything about what’s going on in the energy field: just that I’m used to making do without it.
‘Young man’, my father used to say, “you can’t just coast through life”.
Oh yes I can – and I get great mileage too.

But I don’t think it’s fair.
The rich are the only ones that can afford beach-front property, and now they’re going to let them build wind farms there.
That’s like having a house in an oil field.
They call them ‘wind farms; but they don’t grow the wind there. Maybe they should call them ‘wind slaughterhouses’?
Actually, they don’t kill the wind there either; they just package it, for re-sale.

And that just about does it: I mean, is there anything in the world that they haven’t figured out how to charge us for using it?
What about air?
You know - the wind that just sits there: otherwise known as our energy reserves
We can still breathe fee-free, but give them another five or ten years and you’ll be tickled pink to be able to order your air online, and save the cost of driving to Wal-Mart for a six-pack of Oxy.
Or, if you’re reasonably well off, they’ll pump it to your house.
Towns will charge a betterments fee to homeowners for running oxygen lines down the street.
Cars will be equipped to load up on gas, water, and air.
They’ll be grades of air: regular, for the air in malls and to inflate basketballs; Super, for everyday home consumption; and Premium, for a hot date.
You won’t have to get out of your car.
You won’t be able to get out of your car.
You won’t want to get out of your car.

And the ideological conservatives out there are probably crying out now –like a pack of crows, ‘negative, negative, negative’.
Yes, yes, we liberals are so darn negative.
We can’t see the forest for the fees.
We can’t see the opportunities that will arise out of these so-called temporary setbacks.
Instead of whining about gas fees and air fees and the latest energy crisis, we should be hard at work exploiting the situation: that’s the American Way!
Real Americans have already made a substantial investment in bus companies!
After all, our senior citizens have fixed incomes, and can’t absorb the sudden rise in the cost of gasoline.
The only way they’ll be able to afford regular trips to Foxwoods is by bus!
Brilliant!
Then again, let’s really think outside of the tank.
Buses use up quite a lot of fuel: why not take carpooling to the next level?
Instead of everybody getting on the bus, let’s designate one super gambler to go to Foxwoods, while the rest of the folks from the Nursing Home watch a live web cast of the event.

Yes, I know: this is no laughing matter.
What’s to become of historic Plymouth when the hysteric public decides to save the cost of a tank of gas and get their history at home?
Do I hear opportunity knocking, again?
If they won’t come to the Rock, we will take the Rock to them!
For the price of a tank of gas and a weekend in a chain hotel, you can have an inflatable Mayflower Moonwalk delivered to their door by a teenager in a three-cornered hat, and throw in a can of B&M Brown Bread at no extra cost!
You’ll be selling them air, history, and ‘gas’ (if you know what I mean) in one sweet, educational package!

Hey, I’m beginning to get the hang of this ‘Morning in America’ approach to economic and environmental disaster.
And that goes for you owners of Ford Expletives too.
So I’m not going to do the expected and excoriate you for wasting an entire Mesozoic era’s worth of fossil fuels just so you can look good at the Little League field: no sirree!
Instead, I am going to appeal to your vanity –and your pocketbook, in one fell swoop!
I’m going to push for the re-installation of the trolley lines that used to run all over the South Shore, only, instead of those funky old trolley cars, we’re going to run a fleet of modified Humminah Hummers on the tracks.
Imagine the looks on your friends faces when you pull up to the domed Little League field in your eco-friendly Hummer?

That’s the genius of America: we don’t need to prepare for anything.
We’re the best in the world when it comes to figuring out a way to make cash out of our screw-ups.
Iraq may be a military disaster, but it’s a construction boom!
New Orleans may still be as soggy as a microwaved hamburger bun, but there’s gold in them thar swamps.
The present administration has intentionally declined to prepare for just about every eventuality, making it necessary to spend far more money to recover than we ever would have spent being prepared.
Brilliant!

And to think people were calling the ‘Big Dig’ a colossal waste of taxpayer’s money.
The problem with the Big Dig is not that it cost so much, it’s that we committed to spending the money first, and so we’re restricted as to how much money the taxpayers have allowed us to spend.
If we’d followed the new Bush II Pre-Emptive Disaster Economic Playbook, we would have just waited a few years until the bridges into the city were collapsing on their own, and then pleaded for the government to bail us out.
There’s hope though: if we can just elect just one more brush-burning, Enron-loving, ‘nucular’ LaLouche, we may still be able to delay any serious response to Global Warming for another four years, by which time the polar ice caps will have melted, most of our coastline will be flooded (except for New Orleans), and..

Well, you know: when it comes to energy sales, the sky’s the limit!