Have you ever noticed that Rush only talks about environmental issues with regards to climate change, which he of course dismisses as bunk?  (Actually that's not entirely true: he also talks about the Gulf oil spill, the environmental consequences of which he dismisses as bunk.)

This is interesting because everyone else in the world understands that there is a vast and varied collection of environmental issues.  Species depletion, wasting natural resources, plastic pollution in the oceans, Peak Oil, chemical contamination of our ground water… the list goes on and on.

I always thought that Republicans were against waste.  Isn't that a major plank in their platform?  No wasteful spending?  

Funny, then, that this attitude definitely does not apply to oil and other forms of energy.  Rush Limbaugh famously once sent his private jet to make a coast to coast round trip flight completely empty, as a way of thumbing his nose at Earth Hour.  That's a waste!  A pretty significant one.  

Imagine if Obama had ordered an unoccupied plane to fly back and forth across the country.  You can bet your bottom dollar Rush would have been stamping his feet and spitting with rage at the waste of money and fuel.  But that's Obama!  Rush is different.  Rush has lots of money, so it's okay if he wants to waste it.

Wait, how is that different?  Is it different because it's Rush's own money?  Well I can see that point of view, sure. But what about the fuel?  Burning all that gas for nothing - that's a waste.  

Energy literally pours from the sky every day, and falls unheeded to the ground.  Especially in a place like Florida!  Yet Rush sneers at solar power.  I don't understand this attitude, either.  If dollar bills fell from the sky every day, I'm sure Rush would be out there with a  basket.  (He's not THAT stupid!)  

But electricity costs money, which Rush has to pay.  So essentially, dollar bills ARE falling from the sky every day.  And yet Rush isn't capturing them with solar panels.  It boggles the mind!  I guess he's afraid people will think he's going soft.  

That's the problem with painting everything with a single brush.  If you lump all environmental issues (no matter how tangential) under the rubric of "climate change," and then you deny it, there's no room for anything else.  No room for installing solar panels because it's a whopping huge cash savings, and it's basically free money.

Rush wants his audience to believe that everything in life falls into one of two buckets.  But you know what?  Life is vast, and complicated, and very little of it actually belongs in those buckets.  

The truth is, life is a lot more complicated than bombastic soapbox shouters like Rush would have you believe.  For example, the world is not evenly divided into "hippies" and "Nazis."  We're all just people, living our lives as best we can.  And if you insist on referring to people who install solar panels as "environmentalist wacko Communists," then you're both wasteful AND financially imprudent.

Photo credit: Flickr/Martin La Bar