Are you a clean air champion?
Last Christmas we were blessed with a light rain storm prior and as the skies cleared, and the temperature changed, I was looking forward to a nice Yule log for the holidays and the smell of hickory and freshly cooked beef and ham.
Alas, it was not to be.
Our Christmas Scrooge government, Mother Hen, and all around evil overlords at the Capitol, decided there were too much particulates in the air for the holidays, and issued a ‘clean air alert’ for Maricopa county.
Thus, anyone lighting an open fire, using a leaf blower or as the Air Quality (AQ) board determines, excessive use of dust materials, got a fine- up to 250 dollars.
Now before you laugh it off, in our neighborhood, the local fire department were driving their trucks around and stopping at various houses where they saw fires burning, flipped on their truck lights and were paying friendly visits from ‘der Commissar’. I don’t know if any fines were issued to my neighbors, or whether they just warned off, but surely, doesn’t the fire department have better things to do then check on one person’s piddly old fireplace on Christmas Eve?
It sounds like a plot from a bad Rankin Bass Christmas Special where a bunch of big burly guys go around stamping out the Yule log.
Unfortunately, there’s much more to it than that as well. If you go over to the AZ AQ board’s Website, it directs you to the Clean Air Make More site, where you can apply to be a Clean Air Champion and rat out your neighbors. Worse, they are educating kids in the classroom to rat out their parents, with a cartoon figure called Cory The Cloud. Government prevented Camel cigarettes from using cartoon logos to sell a legal product, but apparently its ok to use them to teach children to be environmental Nazis. They had a contest to make the logo among the sixth graders in the valley, and one kid came up with Cory and won a new bike. The bike was provided by KORE bike industries, a local Scottsdale retailer.
Yeah let’s bribe the kids and involve them in our plot to de-evolve civilization. From the AQ Website:
He’s got a thing for healthy air. In other words, he’s happiest when he’s floating around in a clean, blue sky. From up there, he can see a lot. And what he likes to see most is people making more clean air. Riding their bikes, using brooms and rakes instead of blowers, getting on buses and trains, and controlling dust on construction sites. So the next time you’re outside enjoying the fresh air, look up. You just might see Cory looking down at you. And if he’s smiling, it’s because you’re keeping the air clean.
Why don’t we all go back to living in mud huts and getting our food with energy efficient spears too? Not burning a yule log one day will give us clean air? Baloney.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this outrage. We have schools where the kids can barely read or write a comprehensive paragraph, and we are wasting their time and our money on teaching them how NOT to use a leaf blower and rat out their parents to the state. A few fire places burning on the holidays are just not that serious a problem to devote these kinds of resources to- nor should it on a Christmas day. The state should take a holiday and save a few bucks, and give us all a brief respite from the commissars office, dontcha think?
Speaking of money, why are we cutting off people from medical care, while we waste money on paying fireman to douse the Yule log, and sending commissars out to schools to brainwash kids with Cory the Cloud to sell ‘clean air’? How much does the AQ board drain from our state coffers? Look I’m all for more environmentally friendly solutions to pollution and good industrial regulations, but this is taking it too far. All those dollars could be put to better use. How many dollars?
Approximately 17.8 million dollars, based on the most recent budget figures provided by the OMB.- and that’s just for Maricopa county. That’s larger than the county animal control department, the juvenile defenders office, solid waste management, and almost as large as the entire county justice courts system which comes in at 24 million.
Meanwhile, the lefties are screaming about how much money (about 5 million) we are cutting out of AHCCCS, and how it’s letting people die, but not one complaint about the 17 million we are dropping on programs to douse the Yule log and yell at people to ride their bikes to work.
Well maybe that’s the plan.
Less people alive for the holidays means less fires to put out.
