CFACT’s campus arm, Collegians For A Constructive Tomorrow, is in D.C. this week for CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), and they are already drawing attention with a human-sized hamster wheel! CBS News covered the story, demonstrating that CFACT’s Collegians have a knack for creative activism that communicates our message of free-market environmentalism to a large audience. (Click here for the press release)
This time, Collegians has targeted renewable energy. Radical environmentalists and the Obama administration want America to stop using the reliable clean coal power that supplies the country with affordable electricity. Instead, they call for a switch to so-called “renewable” energy sources like wind, solar, and biofuels. But these “renewable” energy sources have major problems of their own. Renewables are unsustainable because of the vast amounts of land, rare earth minerals, and other natural resources that they consume.
Enter CFACT’s Human Hamster Wheel of Renewable Energy (HHWRE)! As CFACT’s Christina Wilson says, “If everybody in America had one of these in their houses, we would no longer need fossil fuels. So this our Green Energy Enhancer Employment Act of 2011.” If the government would just mandate a switch to HHWRE, not only would we be cured of our “addiction” to fossil fuels, but it would solve the unemployment problem overnight by creating millions of green jobs, since each human hamster wheel needs a person to run in it! Unlike the green jobs created by solar and wind power which disappear as soon as the wind turbines or solar panels are installed, the HHWRE is guaranteed to keep millions of Americans employed indefinitely!
A human hamster wheel policy is obviously foolish, since it would only be reliable as long as the human operator does not tire, and the “green” jobs created would actually harm the economy since it would cause the loss of the millions of jobs the operators could be doing instead.
But that is precisely what the green energy policies pushed by the Obama administration and environmental groups would do — shackle Americans to unreliable energy sources, destroy jobs, and devastate the economy.
Once again, CFACT’s Collegians have found a creative way to highlight the problems inherent in renewable energy policies, even if CBS News didn’t seem to get the joke.