The Real World vs The Environmentalist

OK, we all accept that using fossil fuels is bad for the environment, so it's just as well we're running out. Technology is being developed that is cleaner and more efficient and runs on chip fat or orange peel. Years of people strapping themselves to oil tankers are finally having an effect, even if we scoff and attack their tactics while they're at it. I know I have.

Despite their approach, the battle is at least joined, if not won. Governments realise that if they are to protect the way of life they have been elected to protect, they need to move things forward. Hats off to them, I say.

What does annoy me is the response of the environ-mentalists. Governments and Industry are extending the hand of compromise, and the e-mentalists are slapping it away. Every proposal designed to progress society towards an ethos of cleaner, renewable energy is met with a vitriolic "That's not good enough!".

Government: How about we have Wind Farms to generate lots of lovely power?
E-Mentalists: They're not pretty. They ruin the beauty and purity of the countryside for the ramblers.
G: Well, they're not goi...
E: And they kill all the birds. The turbines suck them in cut them into little bits. Thousands of rare European Plump-breasted Tits will be killed every picosecond. They'd be extinct!
G: OK, well, we could go for wave-power? It's a bit more expensive and difficult to maintain, but it's a.....
E: [SLAP] NO. WHY WON'T YOU LISTEN?! We've being telling you for one hundred and fifty million years, Wave Turbines kill fish. Trillions of rare Coke-Bottle-nosed Dolphins would be brutally clubbed every femtosecond. They'd be exstinct inside a millisecond!
G: Oooooo.K., so no wind power because of the birds, no wave power because of the fish. [tentatively]What about Nuclear Power?
E: RRRRRARRRRRRRRRRR! NO, NO, NO! THE HUMANITY! Anything Nuclear is inherently bad. You'll just use them to make bombs, which you'll then drop from bombers onto orphanages in the Congo! Don't think we don't know what you're up to!
G: That's ludicrous! And anyway, that's a different kind of nucl...
E: [SLAP] WE HAVEN'T FINISHED!! We've been saying since the creation of the universe that we want an unobtainable perfect world populated by caring, tolerant people who are self sufficient and would rather stab themselves in the testicles than stand on a blade of grass!
G: Errr, well, what do you want us to do?
E: Don't try and put the blame on us. It's not our job. You're the elected Government. It's your job.

And so on. This is a somewhat lampooned version of the tooing and froing that goes on, but in general the e-mentalists ironically seem to be the people who are preventing the very progress for which they have strapped themselves to squirrels to get.

E-mentalists populate a idealistic world where clean energy and unsullied landscape is their birth-right. Governments live in the real world with scandals, sleaze, waiting lists, league tables and elections. They need to keep most of the people happy most of the time. The two worlds cannot co-exist. Governments are making the effort to meet in the middle. It's about time the environmentalists realised this and did the same.