This is so breathtakingly stupid, it sounds like a parody from Scrappleface or Iowahawk, but apparently it's for real. Yesterday, Ben Smith at Politico.com posted this news from the Edwards campaign:
The politics of global warming got very concrete, and oddly difficult, in a meeting with local environmentalists in the coastal town of McClellanville today, where Elizabeth Edwards raised in passing the importance of relying on locally-grown fruit.
"We've been moving back to 'buy local,'" Mrs. Edwards said, outlining a trade policy that "acknowledges the carbon footprint" of transporting fruit.
"I live in North Carolina. I'll probably never eat a tangerine again," she said, speaking of a time when the fruit is reaches the price that it "needs" to be.
The Bullwinkle Blog commented:
… If … enough people are silly enough to follow her example then a lot of tangerine trees will be chopped down and burned to make room for some crop that will make money so the farmer can feed his family. That's sure to release even more Co2 into the fragile atmosphere!
Won't it also mean that the people who earn their livings transporting fruit will lose their jobs and add to the number of Americans living below the poverty line? …
Heck, that's not the half of it. If Elizabeth Edwards shuns fruit that isn't grown locally, what about other foods? What about manufactured goods? In North Carolina, locally-produced lumber, paper, and furniture may be easy to come by, but what about clothing, consumer electronics, refrigerators, toilets, cars, DVDs, private jets, …?
Is Edwards advocating autarky at the state level (it's a long truck ride from the Outer Banks to Asheville), the county level, or for every village and hamlet (big cities would likely cease to exist in Edwards' tangerine dream world)?
The world this lunatic envisions is the pre-modern world. That would fulfill the enviro-wackos' goal of minimizing the human impact on the planet — by getting rid of 80-90% of the humans and condemning most of the rest to peasant status. Then we really would have "two Americas."
I'm probably over-reacting. I'm sure she hasn't thought this through and isn't serious — it's just the typical empty gesture that liberals indulge in to feel good about themselves.
And if Mrs. Edwards gets a yearning for some tangerines, she can go with the moose's suggestion of tangerine offsets.
