Let’s Go Leaf Peeping in New England!

One of the issues which gets the alt-right all nuts and crazy is the Green New Deal. And the argument erupted again this past week when Joe cancelled oil leases that Trump-o had approved in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. This is a tricky point right now because we are all paying more for gasoline at the pump, and you can be sure the GOP will rev this one up at the appropriate time.

This also happens to be just a couple of weeks away from the annual leaf peeping season in New England, which starts on October 1st and injects serious tourist money into states like Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. I mean, who’s going to argue with vistas which look like the picture above?

But for all the talk and exclaiming about global warming and the need to restrict the use of oil and natural gas, the fact is that we wouldn’t have a single leaf to look at if we hadn’t figured out how to create an energy infrastructure based on fossil fuels.

When the first Europeans arrived at Plymouth in 1620 and were quickly followed by lots more settlers from England and then the European continent, they found themselves facing a solid mass of forests which had to be cut back or cut down in order to create the open spaces needed to graze their animals and plant their food.