The arguments never change:
Instead of moving the debate on energy policy forward, the spill is being used to grind preexisting policy axes. Unfortunately, those axes were none too sharp to begin with, and the grinding now in play does more to confuse than to enlighten.
Unfortunately, that’s usually the case.
I’d like to point out how awful that metaphor is.
One grinds axes to sharpen them.
If the axes are “already very dull”, grinding them is precisely what one should do.
Sigivald, you’re assuming the policy wonks know the proper technique for grinding an axe.
Yes, but at some point you need to stop grinding and use that axe. If the axe ain’t cutting it, going back to the grind stone may not be the answer. At some point you need to get out the chainsaw.
Actually you can over sharpen a dull blade and just make it worse by losing the tempering of the steel. Honing is more appropriate in most situations to return and maintain a sharp edge on a day to day basis. Sharpening is only needed when the blade has just completely lost the edge and little more than a blunt piece of metal. Grinding and sharpening is rarely needed on a well honed properly used axe.
My $15 Chicago Cutlery santoku chef’s knife can get a bit dull sometimes and have a hard time cutting an onion. About 20 passes over a honing steel and it’ll slice so fast you can take a finger off if your not careful. It hasn’t touched a sharpening stone once since I bought it about 5 years ago.
Honing doesn’t actually remove material but instead reshapes the edge back into it’s proper cutting shape and form.
Hopefully this will make the analogy more clear.
Can you apply honing to maintain the edge of an ice skate blade?
The worst thing we ever did to skate blades was sharpen them, and there was nothing worse than a bad sharpening to completely throw your sense of balance off. But if you didn’t sharpen your skates, they would accumulate nicks (maybe these were cosmetic and didn’t affect the “bite” or ability to hold an edge) or simply get dull (where you couldn’t hold an edge, you would simply slide off unless you were perfectly centered about your inertial reference frame, which in ice dance was steeply inclined relative to the ground plane).
One thing I tried was fashioning a polishing tool out of a furniture dowel of the radius of hollow that I wanted, and to use a polishing agent such as jeweler’s rouge (and a lot of elbow grease) to try to maintain the geometry of the skate blade edged surfaces without all of the metal removal involved in sharpening. That seemed to help a little, but it was very labor intensive.