Without Green, Green Fades To Black

Despite previous snarks, I am sympathetic to the green cause. I'm a big fan of open spaces and native flora and fauna. I'm concerned about the environmental damage being done in China and other places where money is pursued regardless of the poisons dumped onto the land and into the water. Having said that, there are financial realities that you can't avoid.

Dig this.

The San Jose Mercury News has an entertaining story on BART defectors, solid Bay Area liberals who have given up on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system:

For three years, Veronique Selgado took BART from the East Bay to her job working for an airline at San Francisco International Airport. But she recently switched to driving because BART raised fares and upped its SFO round-trip surcharge from $3 to $8, boosting her daily trip cost to nearly $20.

"It's outrageous," Selgado said. "At what point do they stop raising the prices, when it's $50 a day to go round-trip to work? At what point does BART stand back and say, 'People can't pay that much to commute'?"

Unfortunately for Selgado, BART fares are in fact too low. The system is so far from being self-sufficient that it required $318 million in local, state and federal tax support in 2009 [pdf].

This is just the tip of the green iceberg. The solar power plants, the wind generators, the electric vehicles, all of them are recipients of subsidies that are dependent on the government having enough discretionary money to spend on such things. Once the state is $20B in the hole and the Federal government is $1.5T in the hole, these projects are going to get cut, either through outright budget cuts or inflationary printing of money. It turns out that sustainable energy is not sustainable.

Now that we're reaching a breaking point with our finances, the green fantasies we've been taught to believe are turning out to be no more real than the Easter Bunny. And he wants his money back.