In a typical Malthusian-panic green response, one group recommends going vegan to save the planet. But Dr. Mironov has another approach: grow the stuff in labs without all the methane. I have no idea whether this will work at all or whether the meat produced that way will taste more like Kobe beef than like the anonymous gray ‘mystery meat’ they used to feed us when I was a promising young sprout back in pundit school. But if Dr. Mironov is even partly right, the dynamics of the world’s food supply, energy use and atmospheric composition are very, very different from what the greens say.
You would think that smart greens genuinely interested in saving the planet would be all over Dr. Mironov’s work like white on rice. You would think that the vast and well organized enviro-agricultural lobbies like the ones that brought us ethanol and the enviro-industrial lobbies like the ones bringing us bad electric cars and expensively subsidized alternative energy sources would be pumping billions or at least hundreds of millions into a relatively simple scientific concept that, if successful, would make the world cleaner while dramatically raising the living standards of much of the world’s population by making a high protein diet more accessible and sustainable.
It’s almost as though they had a different agenda than the one they claim.
Joe Pappalardo target=”_ “deflates Mark Whittington’s favorite space fantasy. Over the past half century, the Pentagon has never found any compelling use for military man in space commensurate with the cost. That could change if the cost comes down dramatically, but there was nothing in NASA’s Constellation plans to make that happen. The new programs offer much more hope in that regard, if they can survive the coming budget tsunami.
I plead guilty to putting two spaces after a period. I learned it when I was in high school (not that I took typing in high school, but that’s when I taught myself from a book on a Selectric) and have been dong it for forty years. Of course, WordPress ignores them, so my blog posts come out single space anyway. But it makes a difference in Open Office or Word.
With the quarter-century anniversary of the Challenger loss coming up next week, my thoughts on where we’ve been, and where we go from here. Even though I’m not really a conservative, I hope that the essay will make sense to them. Because unlike many, I at least speak the language, particularly when properly edited.
[Tuesday morning update]
I would note that there are two companion pieces to this, by Jeff Foust and Bob Zubrin.
…every billionaire eventually discovers that vast wealth is little better than health insurance when it comes to securing good health. Wealth and health insurance are both forms of finance, and whether the plan is deluxe or bare-bones, finance is retrospective — after you get sick, people get paid to treat you. And yet what plutocrats — and all of us — really need is prospective, even preemptive, medical science, the kind that produces not just wellness plans, but actual vaccines and cures. The rich can afford the best doctors, and the plushest hospital suites, but if that scientific spadework isn’t done in advance, if the right cure doesn’t exist when it’s needed, it can’t be bought on short notice at any price. The polio vaccine, for example, took 17 years; genuinely effective treatments for AIDS took 15 years. Cures cannot be impulse purchases. They can’t be bid for on eBay, or even at Sotheby’s.
And the Democrats’ preferred policies will only make things worse. It’s mass murder, really. Or at least manslaughter. If I can be so uncivil.