Pirate's Cove

Well, the Republicans have done something right

After about a month in control of the House of Representatives, Republicans haven’t managed to undo as many deeds of their Democratic predecessors as they’d like. They couldn’t get rid of “Obamacare,” and they haven’t made much headway in slashing the president’s $4-trillion budget. But the GOP has succeeded in short order in one critically important venture: getting rid of the “compostable” cornstarch-based knives, forks and spoons that were a universally — and bipartisanly — hated feature of the House cafeteria operation.

The tableware, the color of mucus and as bendable as a pocket watch in a Salvador Dali painting (and thus unable to pierce any foodstuff firmer than the innards of Brie cheese), was the most visible manifestation of recently deposed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Green the Capitol initiative. That was her carbon-cutting effort to use the food-service and other House operations to fight global warming and a host of other perceived environmental, health and social ills. During the lunchtime rush, you could observe dozens of staffers struggling to stab lettuce leaves and poultry pieces with fork tines that appeared to be double-jointed as well as dull.

But, how “green” were these compostable cornstarch-based cutlery?

It turns out that the composting program not only cost the House an estimated $475,000 a year (according to the House inspector general) but actually increased energy consumption in the form of “additional energy for the pulping process and the increased hauling distance to the composting facility,” according to a news release from Lungren.

As far as carbon emissions were concerned, Lungren concluded that the reduction was the “nominal … equivalent to removing one car from the road each year.” He plans to switch the House to an alternate waste-management system recommended by the Architect of the Capitol, in which dining-service trash would be incinerated and the heat energy captured.

So, instead of the typical symbolic Do Something approach Pelosi took, that not only barely worked, but annoyed the people it affected and reduced their quality of a dining experience, Dan Lungren, the GOP congressman from the Sacramento area who now heads the House Administration Committee, is instituting a reality based solution that will turn the implements into actual energy.

This is why the climate morons are so dangerous: they live in a world that bears little resemblance to reality, and their solutions often create other, and sometimes bigger, problems. If they had decided to slowly push real world solutions that actually work, and without all the climate alarmism, we might have had quite a bit more, and cheaper, alternative energy by this time, along with an upgraded electrical grid. But, no, they had to act loony tunes, which turns people off, and makes what should have been Very Good Ideas into perceived wacko ideas. Thanks, morons!