Nothing New Under The Sun

Holy cow this film is something like 100 years old. Was Edison cranking the handle? I kept expecting Charlie Chaplin to appear.

It starts out with the usual lament. We’re running out of coal, of all things. The only endangered species on display isn’t coal, it’s a man willing to do more than watch football on TV in his basement, and a two-parent family next door. But let’s not quibble. The denizens of ye olde draftopolis are interrogating the cloud people on how they were able to keep ice from forming on the goldfish bowl. The answer, which is not directly mentioned in the video, was asbestos. They covered everything in asbestos.

I’m not an environmentalist, I guess. The word itself contains the word “mentalist.” Now, I can predict the future (it will be worse), but I’m not really a mentalist, or an environmentalist. Environmentalists commute to work on recumbent bicycles and paddle plastic kayaks on the weekends. I commute to work in my socks and have a boat I built entirely from wood in my basement. It’s never been launched.

I simply don’t like wasting things. They don’t have a name for that anymore. I’ve saved more stuff than any ten environmentalists. I’m wary of wonder cures for everyday problems. It’s how you end up with everything in your house, including most of the house itself, made from plastic. It’s how paint and gasoline ended up with copious doses of lead in them. Hell, they used to put mercury into paint to kill spiders who might walk over it.

The video is labeled “Energy conservation in the Home in the 1920s,” but in today’s parlance, conservation just means rationing. This is different. These people are trying to get more bang for the same buck. They didn’t like wasting things, either, or wearing their winter coats to bed in January.

So they insulated the jacket of the furnace, and all the pipes, with asbestos. They got more heat in the right parts of their house for the same amount of money, and the installers all got mesothelioma at no extra charge.

One wonders if in 100 years, an ill-informed internet so-and-so will post a video of the benighted 2020s, and wonder why everyone thought coal was evil, but lithium, cadmium, and a healthy dose of cobalt was peachy.