Fantasy and Reality- Energy Activist Style

I was lying on the couch last night, reading a peak-oil-activist account of the near future, with fewer cars and limited electricity, when the contrast between her vision of reality and the actual reality of my neighborhood came into sharp focus. My college-age neighbors drive their cars and trucks half a block to go to school. Not kidding. I wish I could walk or bike the 3 miles to my workplace, but it is not safe to do so. Being a victim of robbery is considered "paying Memphis tax" around here. 

Though the temperature was in the mid-80s and cooling, the neighborhood roared with the sound of air conditioners (I could hear them because our windows were open, and our AC has remained off since the heat of summer broke last fall). Our electricity is stable, and 2/3 coal-fired. Houses glow with security lights and big-screen TVs.

Our city is not set up for much use of mass transit. There's no way to travel from my house to work by bus without walking at least 1/2 mile to a less-safe area, then having to go all the way downtown, change buses, and come back. I could walk all the way there in only a little more time than it would take by bus, if I could make it without getting mugged.

I know things  may change, but I wonder if the people who advocate using carbon taxes to beat us all into using less energy have fully considered the suffering they are asking to inflict on others. Who drives the oldest, gas-guzzling cars? Who lives in older houses with bad windows and old appliances? The poor and the elderly. They cannot afford solar panels and wind turbines and rain barrels. They cannot afford a $40,000 electric vehicle, or the electricity to charge it through their aged wiring, or new batteries every 2 years. Activists point out that climate change is already inflicting suffering on people. I would counter that the Earth has warmed and cooled several times without our input, and will again. Didn't the Viking explorers call Greenland by its name for a reason, and grow crops there for a few hundred years before it got too cold again, and call Canada Vinland for all the wild grapes?

Yes, we should prepare for coastal flooding- but in hurricane prone areas, they should have been prepared anyway. We should help people who need to relocate, if they request help. We should not waste the bountiful gifts God has given us, and a bit of walking would help greatly with the "obesity epidemic". But taxing people into submission has been tried here before-with mixed results (reduced smoking recently, revolution in the more distant past). I'm afraid to see the stories of hypothermia in winter, heatstroke in summer, and hardship because it was too expensive to drive and too unsafe to walk to work. I hope these people get out of their urban or suburban middle-class enclaves and ask how the other half lives (Drive your Prius through Frayser, will you please?), then think things through before advocating "drastic action" that could kill thousands, drain funds, and not accomplish a thing for the climate.