Per slashdot, today was declared by someone or other “Blog Action Day.”  Someone decided to spontaneously try to get everyone to blog about the environment.  Riiiight.  Well I for one am inspired.

So today is the most recently declared “Blog Action Day.”  This particular declaration from whatever group that nobody is going to care about when the not-news leaves the slashdot front page is that this day is for blogging about the environment.  Now, a lot of you probably think that I’m going to blog about how we should be doing more to save the environment, or how wonderful it is, or something to that effect.  Therefore, so you know what you’re getting into, and for the rest of you who are going to say tl;dr: fuck environmentalists.

I was going to say the environment there, but that wasn’t quite right.  I have no problem with the environment, save that it seems to inspire people to interfere with perfectly reasonable plans of others.  Granted, I found GreenPeace hanging themselves off of the Aurora Bridge to try to block some kind of large ship coming into Lake Washington and then being arrested and having no net effect whatsoever EXTREMELY amusing, but I imagine marine traffic on the ship canal didn’t.

There’s this measure on the Washington State ballot this November, Proposition 1.  It’s called the Roads and Transit Measure, and that’s basically what it is.  Massive improvements to main roads, including a few badly-needed expansions of interstate highways, and transit in the Puget Sound area.  One of the biggest opponents of it is the Sierra Club.  Now think about this for a minute.  Transit has a huge positive effect on the environment.  Arguably, better roads do as well – faster throughput means cars on the roads for shorter times, therefore less emissions, therefore smaller impact on the environment.  QED.  But no.  Expanding the freeways is going to have another impact on the environment – they have to take out a few trees to make room.  God forbid.

Get over it, people.  The environment isn’t in the greatest shape, but it’s improved drastically in the last few decades, despite Al Gore (HE’S CERIAL!) and his contemporaries.   Could we improve it more?  Yeah.  But is that really why you want me to drive a hybrid?  No, it’s so you can make gas cost more (sales are down!) so you can afford more money to hire someone to drive you around in a stretch-Hummer limo when you retire, you fucking pig of a half-wit oil executive.  I know your game.

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But really though.  The real reason people buy Priuses and their kin are not because they’re low emissions.  It’s because “low emissions” translates to “high mileage” usually.  Quit pretending to try to help the environment so you can feel good about that and feel good about driving technology forward (pun intended) instead.  And if I’m lucky, you might even drive the cost downward.