My Green Job

President O today, in his remarks concerning the Merikan Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, provided a hint at what sorts of green jobs will be created.

My job is one of them. Apparently, I'm working in a green field and I didn't even know it.

A piece of this plan is to "lay" 3,000 miles of new electrical transmission lines to market renewable resources to loads. And what must every one of these lines have? Protection!

For the past three years (and if I have my way the next twenty three) I've been working as a protection engineer, whose purpose is to identify faulted high voltage equipment and promptly remove it from service, to ensure we don't burn down transmission lines, transformers, generators, shunt capacitors, and to ensure the entire system remains stable following a fault disturbance. I've said it before, there is no better job out there, it's societally required and economically bombproof. All these 33,000 people laid off yesterday...they'll all be staying at home consuming electricity, won't they. You'd think I'm such an asshole for this remark but I'm required to do so as a social critic. Someone's gotta say it -- these lost jobs are chiefly the result of an unsustainable debt-fueled conspicuously consumptive society having hit its natural limit. It was going to happen, and if you didn't prepare yourself and you kept flipping houses, iPods or 1080p's right up till the end, well, you've no sympathy from me.

Back to the topic at hand. Apparently my job is now green! Well...sort of. Provided the lines to be protected are used to deliver green energy, I guess it is. Problem is, we mix all this up with coal and gas fired generation, too. SMUDs Solano wind is thrown in with Kiefer's "renewable" landfill methane and thrown in with Intermountain coal.


I am and will continue to remain skeptical about Obama's call for reversing our dependence on foreign energy. We've got seven former presidents in a row who all said the same fucking thing, all of whom presided over increased dependence and increased per capita use. To say that this didn't at least contribute to our current predicament would be mendacious.

Consider our need to access cheap hydrocarbons underneath the world's brown people, if after we spent a third of our wealth to get it we didn't then piss it all away by building all our suburban slums twenty four miles away from everything, consider how much wealth we'd still have! Then we spent another third diamond-plating our freeways and bridges (they're in great shape, aren't they?) We spent the last third waging wars to keep the lubricant of our economy, energy, cheap and plentiful.

I am skeptical. I'm still two steps away from hope.