This Blogger Is Peeved

Last night, I caught a ride up to Sugarloaf mountain for the first of two evenings of public hearings on the Black Nubble wind farm proposal.

There, I got seriously PISSED OFF after hearing from dozens of blue-haired retirees waxing poetic about what a tragedy it would be if we built turbines on a few acres of ridgeline in western Maine just to prevent hundreds of pounds of mercury and thousands of tons of greenhouse gases from poisoning our atmosphere every year. Talk about your jackass environmentalism - these people were so loopy, so elitist, and so helmeted in their own rectums that I had to run outside twice in the middle of the hearings just to take brisk walks up the ski trails and cool my jets.

This little episode has riled me up enough to produce at least a month's worth of blog posts, so I'll resist the urge to get into it all right now. In the meantime, Portland-area readers are encouraged to attend this not entirely unrelated event. I haven't read the book yet, but it sounds pretty great: a natural history of our oilsheds, from the commodity's source in the springs of Nigeria and the North Sea, through the Great Canyons of Russian mobsters and Saudi extremists, and out through the massive delta of American tailpipes.

Please be our guest on Tuesday, September 25th at 7pm, at Longfellow Books, for a reading and discussion with Lisa Margonelli, author of the recent book Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline.

Weekend Edition Saturday, February 24, 2007: "Oil was once an alternative fuel, much easier to come by than whale blubber and less poisonous to the air than coal. This is among the nuggets you might learn from Lisa Margonelli. It takes her from local gas stations to an Iranian oil platform, a Texas drilling rig, Nigeria, Chad and Shanghai to trace the path of the commodity that seems to command so much of our economy and politics."

We hope you can join us for a stimulating conversation on this important topic.