Breaking Wind

Billions for green energy, not one cent for nuclear ...  Here is a recent Op Ed from the New York Times revealing what the tree huggers are doing to the trees in Vermont ... all to reduce our nation's "carbon footprint" by a teeny weeny fraction of one percent. See: Green Mountaineering.  It's one thing to see huge wind farms on the barren highway passes between LA and Las Vegas, but on an entire ridgeline in Vermont?  Ouch!  And how do these hugely-expensive politically-correct projects get funded?  You guessed it ... mainly by that kindly old man with the billy-goat beard, striped pants, and a cut-away coat.

Have we learned nothing from the failure of the green energy initiatives in Spain? (See: No Gain in Spain.)  Please also read this link that describes an Obama $61 billion slush fund called the Federal Financing Bank ... see: Secret Government Bank.  This revealing reference was given to me by a contributor who also seems worried about how our current government is squandering billions upon billions of dollars on questionable green-energy projects ... none of which so far involves the splitting of an atom.

Afterthought: Here is a list of wind turbine manufactures: Wind Turbines.  Is all this green energy B.S. adding or subtracting from our balance of payments and employment levels?

Atomic Ant

Barack Obama has made a dramatic commitment to “alternative energy” to combat that bubble-headed bugaboo “greenhouse gasses.” Apparently to him this only means solar and wind energy (and possibly geothermal) methodologies. He has also vowed to put out of business the utilities that burn coal for electricity (see Bankrupting Coal ). He also said in his campaign that he would “consider” expanding our nuclear electrical generating capabilities. We currently get about 20% of our electricity from nuclear power plants (see: United States Nuclear) whereas France (see: French Nuclear) gets over 75% and Japan (see: Japan Nuclear) gets over 35% of their electricity from same. And many of our nuclear power plants are getting quite old and do not take advantage of many of the advances made in this technology over the last twenty years.

But two other facts have recently been revealed to me (on CSPAN this past weekend) that show that Obama may have briefly considered expanding nuclear energy … but he has just as quickly rejected it. Witness:

- The recent $789 billion Stimulus Bill contains no governmental loan guarantees for building more nuclear power plants. Because of the incredible high capital investment required, without these guarantees, it is quite unlikely that any new nuclear plants will be built during Obama’s tenure.

- The Energy Department, under Obama, has recently stopped construction on the long-term nuclear waste storage facility being built at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Storing nuclear waste has one of the primary barriers to our expansion of nuclear power generation.
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To put this problem in its proper perspective, take some time perusing the following table of energy consumption trends in the United States (see U.S. Energy Consumption. Print it out and put it on your refrigerator). Now these are numbers put out by the U.S. Government … so they are not more smoke being blown up our rear ends by Sierra Club tree-huggers. From this table it is very clear that, for coal generation of electricity to be replaced by solar arrays, wind farms, and geothermal energy, it would require an expansion of these latter three sources by over 30,000 %. This is pure fantasy. (Again, please, please take the time to study this data.) Are Obama and his advisors reading this data? If they are and if they persist with their fairy-tale green energy policies, then they are pulling the biggest scam in political history. And this is a scam that may well cost our economy its future and cause our future generations to retreat to cave-dwelling.

One last thought – how come Iran can pursue nuclear power generation (even if just a chimera) with liberal assent … while we are denied this option?