In Terms of Environmentalism, For Every Action There Is an Equal and Opposite Reaction

I met a guy at the farmers’ market just now who asked me what I was doing with my life.  In the course of my explanation, I mentioned that renewables and cleantech generally are facing a stiff headwind associated with the current administration in the U.S. government.

He asked me if I had noticed that this so-called “headwind” generates its own opposition, and, of course, he’s 100% correct; in fact, this is precisely the type of erudition one expects from these liberal Santa Barbara intellectuals.  🙂  Seriously, there are people all over the country who are interested in the environment now who couldn’t spell the word a couple of years ago. The more over-the-top the Trump administration goes with dismantling the EPA, approving pipelines, opening up more public land for oil and gas exploration, rolling back regulations associated with clean air and water, etc., the more people come out of the woodwork to prevent all this destruction from taking place.

Of course, this is all amplified by the phenomenon I call “The Circus Is in Town!”  There are very few apolitical Americans at this point, because of the sheer din of what’s taking place each and every day in Washington.  Who doesn’t want to know what sort of inane tweet we’re going to hear when we wake up in the morning?  What minority, nation, or celebrity did something that infuriated our leader, and what sort of presidential whiplash did they receive in response?  Which 150-year-old source of journalism, universally trusted for its integrity, whose readership is skyrocketing, wrote something unflattering and was labeled as “failing” and/or “fake news?”

It really has awakened people who hadn’t voted since “Give ‘Em Hell Harry Truman” was in the White House.  On a side note, it makes us feel sorry for the people who write scripts for television dramas involving the federal government.  Anything imaginable, regardless of how outrageous is already happening in real life; at this point, it’s absolutely impossible to shock—or even interest—Americans with political fiction.