Sunday the news will be full of the tales of a massive demonstration in D.C. by a horde of self styled environmentalists. They plan to plug new pipelines, prevent new coal ports, and outright end the burning of anything for the purpose of lighting, heating, or cooking on our cold planet. And travel? Bicycles might be OK, but don’t even think of putting an engine on that two wheeler. 

Now I know a couple of folks going to D.C. for the demonstration, and they’re nice folks and probably wouldn’t care to live in cold dark caves. You can read up on their movement on http://www.350.org, and they have some legitimate points- We’re burning too much greenhouse gas causing fuels and dangerously bakin’ the planet, and if we keep it up at this pace we’re gonna have a future of droughts punctuated by superstorms.

Their strategy is simple: blockade the coal and oil that creates the nasty greenhouse gasses. Thus they’re trying to get rural folks across the great plains to oppose new pipelines on grounds that they’re protecting aquifers and farmers and ranchers rights, and organizing river valley dwellers in the bluff country to oppose frac sand mining to protect trout or something. We gearheads are wrongly considered the enemy, even though we enjoy riding through the scenic bluff country too. Good causes, but reality is that this extremist environmental movement is just using those folks, their real goal being total plugging of our petroleum supply.

Now I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the coal biz, and if they want to survive they’d best clean up their act- There’s a horde of ancient coal fired power plants with zilch air pollution reducing equipment that ought to lose their grandfathered rights to pollute and be cleaned up or shut down. And I’ve been using renewables for years- primary heat source  in both my northern abodes is wood, and I’ve been feeding the F800S and Ranger E30 whenever I can buy it. But renewables have their limits- solar dies at sundown, wind energy output droops at times, up north here we can’t use full strength biodiesel in the winter, etc.. The environmental extremists response to these shortcomings in their energy strategy is to tell us to move into a condo in a big city, take public transit, and don’t even think of owning, never mind riding, a motorcycle. They make exception for wealthy environmentalists who can afford solar arrays, electric cars, and the tow bills to haul them home when they die. And even if you manage to own a contraband motorcycle in their renewable energy utopia,   filling the tank for a short ride might cost a weeks pay after they’ve managed to shut down the flow of oil… And as you drain the tanks of abandonned vehicles hoping to procure enough gas to make it home, a wealthy environmentalist will pass you in an electric car with a six figure pricetag on his way to his million dollar home with the six figure solar array on the roof.

Fortunately, the environmental extremist’s blockade is bein’ “run”- Every day several hundred plus car unit trains of crude from the Bakken parade by my Buffalo Ridge abode, enroute to Gulf refineries. Heck, ran across an article the other day that suggested that some of the pipelines the environmental extremists are trying to plug may not get built anyways, because rail transport isn’t that much more expensive. And the frac sand? In the last few months the rig count in the Bakken has dropped, and with it the demand for fraq sand, just as every idiot and their brother is trying to open yet another frac sand pit in the Bluff country. 

So if the environmental extremists try to co-opt you into their movement with promises to protect the scenic bluffs or whatever, don’t trust them… I they succeed, you won’t be able to afford the fuel to ride to that scenic bluff country anyway!