READY, FIRE, AIM: Endangered Species

Image: The Punishment of Loki, by J. Doyle Penrose; detail.

I only rarely come across snakes here in Pagosa Springs, for which I am eternally grateful, since I suffer from ophidiophobia. That is, a fear of snakes. This is admittedly a difficult confession, because no one else in my family has ever suffered from this psychological defect.

The thing is, you can never tell if a snake is poisonous.  I simply assume they’re all poisonous.

With that in mind, readers can understand why I jumped nearly out of my skin when I came across a snake in my driveway.

Or rather, what I thought was a snake.

Okay, you can laugh at me for being frightened by a piece of electrical cord.  I’ve been laughed at before, and no doubt will be again. In fact, a humor columnist like myself gets personal validation from being laughed at.

One person who isn’t laughing is a Norse god named Loki, who has been bound for eternity to a stone altar, as a punishment.  The gods have placed a poisonous snake above him so that the venom will constantly drip onto Loki’s face.

Loki’s wife Sigyn loves him so much that she stays with him, holding a bowl above Loki’s head to catch the poison from the snake. Every time the bowl is full, she leaves to pour out the poison, and at that moment the poison drips onto Loki’s face. This makes him shake violently in pain, so the whole earth shakes, and that’s the reason we have earthquakes.

Without Sigyn’s love and her little bowl, we’d have a lot more earthquakes.

But what I really wanted to write about is endangered species.

An electrical cord that looks like a snake is the perfect image for this discussion.

First, a few kind words about snakes. They eat rodents. We can’t even imagine how many rats and mice we would be dealing with, if it weren’t for snakes. On the other hand, a kingsnake prefers to eat rattlesnakes, which he can do because he’s immune to the venom.  (Unlike Loki.)

In my next life, I want to come back as a kingsnake.

Many types of snakes are currently endangered, but they are not the only endangered species these days.

Electricity is also endangered.

I know electricity is not technically a species, as we normally think of a species. But it’s a species of energy. And it’s endangered.

Not so much in Colorado. But nationally.

In Colorado, we’re totally in favor of preventing the extinction of various species. The Lesser Prairie-Chicken. The Gunnison sage-grouse. The Colorado pikeminnow. The Razorback sucker. The Leonard’s skipper butterfly.

We even protect plants. Kremmling milkvetch. Dudley Bluffs twinpod. Parachute beardtongue, etc.

But our current federal government is trying to exterminate electricity and replace it with oil and gas. They’ve paused permits on all new wind and solar projects on public land, both onshore and offshore, according to reporter Elizabeth Weise, writing in USA Today.

Building on his dislike of “ugly” wind turbines and “ridiculous” solar farms, President Trump…

…has issued a blizzard of directives and executive orders limiting new solar and wind projects across the county. In at least one case, the administration yanked back an already-issued permit.

Instead, the administration is promoting energy production from oil, natural gas and coal, which the Biden administration had made more expensive through regulations Trump is now dismantling.

“They’re basically trying to make it impossible or next to impossible to build wind or solar power in this country while at the same time rolling back regulations on fossil fuels,” said Nick Krakoff, senior attorney with the Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation, a nonprofit environmental organization.

This change is happening just as the rest of the world – especially China – are investing in cheap power from wind and solar.

So electricity is not endangered everywhere. Just in America.

In fact, China is installing wind and solar projects faster than any other country, and today operates almost half the world’s wind farms. In 2023 China built out more wind and solar than the rest of the world combined. This year, battery electric and plug-in hybrid cars will account for roughly half of all new vehicle sales in the country, a level the central government had not expected to see until the mid-2030s.

This past May, China’s solar power reached 1,000 gigawatts… compared to 134 gigawatts of solar in the U.S., where we’re yanking back permits.

Yes, I agree with the President, that wind turbines are ugly.  But maybe not as ugly as other types of energy?

Although i confess to having ophidiophobia, I do not suffer from electrophobia.  But it seems obvious to me that certain people in the federal government are suffering from electrophobia.

Electrophobia is the morbid fear of electricity, as you might guess.

A person suffering from electrophobia will feel intense anxiety when having to deal with electricity.  Such a person would never poke a fork into an electrical outlet, for example.  The fear of electricity isn’t completely irrational because electricity — like snakes — can be dangerous. But people with electrophobia have lost their ability to rationalize the situation.

According to Ms. Weise’s USA Today article, nations that have hitched their wagon to oil and gas are referred to as “petrostates”.

China, meanwhile, has transformed itself into an “electrostate”.

One of these two types of “-states” is endangered.  And we all know which type.