From an away game:
Efficiency is a wonderful thing, but eventually you reach the point of diminishing returns.
Our air today in the US is cleaner than it has been at any time in our industrial history. You simply can’t burn coal or petroleum products any cleaner without a huge investment in technologies that produce smaller and smaller returns with every new generation. Our water today is also cleaner than it has been since the Industrial Revolution, for similar reasons. (The main issue with water today is overuse, not purity. If we don’t start refilling aquifiers pretty soon, we’re going to be in trouble.)
Yet the rest of the world (particularly the developing part, and I’m looking at you, China) continues to use old technologies that pollute the air and the water at rates higher than the US did at any time in my lifetime.
If you want clean and green power, you’d better be considering nuclear, or you’re not serious about operating a high-tech civilization. Today’s nuclear power is not Three Mile Island (which accident, by the way, has always been overhyped by the green left anyway).
If you want clean and green water, stop letting the EPA do things like what it did to the Animas River last year and then get away scot free. And if you want water at all in another couple of decades, start paying more attention to how water is used by farmers and industry, rather than making me flush a “low-flow” toilet four times where I could flush one of the old ones in my home once.
Remember, all these efficiencies are being forced on us by people who think they know better than we do, primarily for the purpose of obtaining and maintaining control, not because tiny improvements costing billions of dollars in new infrastructure and damage to the economy are actually doing us any real and lasting good.