Thank you, Jerry, for your edifying and insightful article [The Gospel According to Jerry: Power to the People,” Commentary, March 7] about the Woodfin power-plant conflict and energy politics in general. I’d never realized before just how wrong people who care about the environment are! I particularly enjoyed some of the original and incontestable comments, such as: “We can’t live without a reliable supply of [electricity],” and “Most of us don’t want to go back to the Stone Age.” How ingenious! That really helps put things into perspective.
And as one of the people involved in “sending two punk kids” up a billboard [who] “vandalized private property” (by hanging a sign off of it) to draw attention to the pending Woodfin power plant, I have to say that my position has changed considerably. After reading Jerry’s article, I now see that the real victim is Progress Energy—and similar corporate entities. Everybody’s always trying to bully the power companies when, really, they have the same rights as (big, important) people, so they should be allowed to build as many dirty and unnecessary power plants as they darn well please, just like a normal person could.
And as for the scientific consensus proclaiming that without a radical change in our lifestyles, the devastating effects of climate change will manifest themselves within our lifetimes: Bollocks, I say! Those scientists are probably just, as you so well said, corn-shuck burning, mud-hut living, automobile-eschewing eco-freaks, anyway. They’re obviously not thinking of all the working families who so desperately need to have a computer with so many wires that it “looks like Medusa.” Or something.
Therefore, I intend to cast away my former “intransigent philosophy,” like so many tons of CO2, and instead embrace—along with many others—the Gospel of Jerry. I will stare unblinking into the face of environmental devastation so catastrophic that it threatens most of the life on our planet, from vast ocean ecosystems to isolated mountaintop biota, and I will argue eloquently that it is nothing to fret over, really.
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