Acronymia

Ann Applebaum of the Washington Post deserves a Pulitzer for coming up with the acronym of the year:

The problem plaguing new energy developments is no longer NIMBYism, the "Not-In-My-Back-Yard" movement. The problem now, as one wind-power executive puts it, is BANANAism: "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything." The anti-wind brigade, fierce though it is, pales beside the opposition to liquid natural gas terminals, and would fade entirely beside the mass movement that will oppose a new nuclear power plant. Indeed, the founders of Cape Wind say they embarked on the project in part because public antipathy prevents most other utility investments in New England.

Still, energy projects don't even have to be viable to spark opposition: Already, there are activists gearing up to fight the nascent biofuel industry, on the grounds that fields of switch grass or cornstalks needed to produce ethanol will replace rainforests and bucolic country landscapes. Soon the nonexistent "hydrogen economy" will doubtless be under attack as well. There's a lot of earnest, even bipartisan talk nowadays about the need for clean, emissions-free energy. But are we really ready, politically, to build any new energy sources at all?

Okay, she was quoting "BANANA," but it's still a great line. "Anti-wind brigade" isn't bad, either, particularly in the irony department. I suppose fresh air is conducive to windiness, but not so living in caves, which is where the environmentalists would have all of us huddling like Stone Age savages hoping the local leopard was hunting in Old One-Ear's neighborhood instead (That's a 2001 reference, in case any of you needed a hint). They don't want "clean" energy or "renewable" energy - they don't want us to have any energy at all. "Shutting down the dynamo" was the late William Simon's summation, and the greenstremists keep making him more of a prophet with each passing year.

How such irrational, seriously disturbed, primitivist fruit loops ever got such a stranglehold on national energy policy that a question like Applebaum's last one quoted above can be seriously posed defies explanation. But just as with illegal immigration, where the clear majority of the American public is damn near spoiling for one party or the other to actually listen to them about getting serious about border security, so the BANANAns are going so far overboard and getting so brazenly extreme - in a time of $3 a gallon gasoline that is largely their doing - that the party that at long last stands up to them, says, "Enough!" and bulldozes ahead with offshore drilling (and not just in Alaska) and nuclear power and energy deregulation and low-sulfer coal and oil shale and allowing new refinery construction will reap a political bonanza.

That party sure won't be the Democrats. I wish I couldn't say the same of their opponents.

[h/t: CQ]