Quick question.
Is energy a commodity or is it morality?
The reason I’m asking is because of the increasing mindset that what you do with energy is not your business — even if you pay for it just as you might pay for anything else.
Why are they allowed to get away with this? Because energy is a government-regulated monopoly? Imagine if they did this with other commodities like soap or corn. I am free to buy as much soap as I am willing to pay for, right? And no one will accuse me of using too much, nor will they try to tell me I need to cut back. Even gasoline — the ultimate evil* — is not given the moral eyeball the way government-supplied utilities are.
I’m getting sick of it.
When I was a kid I got the usual lectures about not wasting food because of the starving people in China, and this has a similar ring, only the people doing the scolding are not my parents (who had the right to scold me), but a bunch of worthless bureaucrats and inane activists. What’s up? What’s it to them how much of a given commodity I might pay for and use, unless electricity and water are not commodities?
Should I be grateful that they’re not telling me not to waste precious telephone minutes or write wasteful blog posts?
*Sorry! Forgot about cigarettes, which are more evil than gasoline, yet no one is telling people not to “waste” cigarettes. Where is “peak tobacco”? Try as I might, I cannot compute the logic. It’s all enough to make me lose my mind. . .
Comments
3 responses to “Can I “waste” bandwidth if I pay for it?”
My eco-activist brother was whining about me ‘wasting water’ at my house when he last visited. I asked what he meant by ‘wasted’…does it disappear into space, never to be part of the biosphere ever again or something? I also told him that unless he was paying my water bill, to shut his word-hole and MYOB.
I can understand their encouraging conservation, but this grass-roots stuff has a minuscule effect on consumption. Putting as much time and energy into inventing an electric vehicle battery with a high enough energy-to-weight ratio to be practicable would have a much greater effect.
Those of us who have lived through droughts are not going to put down efforts at water conservation.