[Genuine Realist]

What I'm smoking is wood ash right at the moment. Monstrous fires are a wonderful educational tool.

Strange, me too, and not by choice.

One thing that really bothers me is that when you look at an arial photo of the Sierras you see large patches of dead trees. Those trees are doing nobody any good, and if they catch fire, they will do lots of harm. Yet as I understand it, the Sierra Club always opposes removing those trees because they fear the damage logging roads through healthy parts of the forest will cause. It seems that all the stakeholders, the BLM, the loggers, and the Sierra Club should be able to get together on this and come up with a solution that is acceptable to everyone, at worst the "lesser of may evils". Yet it doesn't happen and we get massive fires. Who wins then?

God, I guess.

My anti-elitist credentials are on view here without apology, and I will freely concede that there is a definite bias in me on that point. I try not to let it get in the way of critical thinking, but it probably does.

That said, has anyone ever commented on the public stage about the colossal damage the Sierra Club has done to the world in the last 50 years? First, there was the Luddite opposition to nuclear power, which has resulted in the unnecessary burning of billions of gallons of oil to heat and provide transportation to the world. To be sure, nuclear has its negatives. But anecdotally, I'm aware of a professor who taught a class on macro economics at a major college. One of the projects the class had to undertake collectively was to devise an energy plan for the US for the next several decades - using coal, oil, renewables, nuclear, etc. Every semester the class would start out with the predictable bias against nuclear . . .  and every semester the class would reluctantly conclude that a substantial reliance on nuclear was the most practical strategy for the near future, despite the negatives. But thanks to the Sierra Club and its fellow travelers, plus the insane form of litigation in the US, adoption of that strategy was abandoned year ago. 

The result is a substantial contribution to the carbon emissions that partially cause global warming, which I would think serves them right, except that me and my children and grandchildren also have to live on the verdammte planet to which they have caused so much harm. There are  few apostates that concede the error of their ways, but of course it is decades too late.

We also have a reflexive reaction even to sensible commercial forest harvesting, for which we are all paying now and will pay in the future. 

The Sierra Club is a classic example of complacent elitism gone mad. But no one seems to say so.

[Genuine Realist]

What I'm smoking is wood ash right at the moment. Monstrous fires are a wonderful educational tool.

Strange, me too, and not by choice.

One thing that really bothers me is that when you look at an arial photo of the Sierras you see large patches of dead trees. Those trees are doing nobody any good, and if they catch fire, they will do lots of harm. Yet as I understand it, the Sierra Club always opposes removing those trees because they fear the damage logging roads through healthy parts of the forest will cause. It seems that all the stakeholders, the BLM, the loggers, and the Sierra Club should be able to get together on this and come up with a solution that is acceptable to everyone, at worst the "lesser of may evils". Yet it doesn't happen and we get massive fires. Who wins then?

God, I guess.

My anti-elitist credentials are on view here without apology, and I will freely concede that there is a definite bias in me on that point. I try not to let it get in the way of critical thinking, but it probably does.

That said, has anyone ever commented on the public stage about the colossal damage the Sierra Club has done to the world in the last 50 years? First, there was the Luddite opposition to nuclear power, which has resulted in the unnecessary burning of billions of gallons of oil to heat and provide transportation to the world. To be sure, nuclear has its negatives. But anecdotally, I'm aware of a professor who taught a class on macro economics at a major college. One of the projects the class had to undertake collectively was to devise an energy plan for the US for the next several decades - using coal, oil, renewables, nuclear, etc. Every semester the class would start out with the predictable bias against nuclear . . .  and every semester the class would reluctantly conclude that a substantial reliance on nuclear was the most practical strategy for the near future, despite the negatives. But thanks to the Sierra Club and its fellow travelers, plus the insane form of litigation in the US, adoption of that strategy was abandoned year ago. 

The result is a substantial contribution to the carbon emissions that partially cause global warming, which I would think serves them right, except that me and my children and grandchildren also have to live on the verdammte planet to which they have caused so much harm. There are  few apostates that concede the error of their ways, but of course it is decades too late.

We also have a reflexive reaction even to sensible commercial forest harvesting, for which we are all paying now and will pay in the future. 

The Sierra Club is a classic example of complacent elitism gone mad. But no one seems to say so.