Who Needs Electricity?

By Alan Caruba

Over at The National Anxiety Center website I have a commentary, “No Energy, Please” regarding the cold reception news of a proposed ExxonMobil “Blue Energy” project received when it was announced. It involves a billion dollar investment in a liquid natural gas storage site to be anchored in the Atlantic Ocean out of sight offshore of New Jersey. The LNG would then be transferred via a pipeline for distribution throughout the northeast. Since natural gas heats many homes in the region, one would think it would be welcome, but not by some NJ daily newspapers.

In fact, if you connect the dots, you will discover there’s no welcome to be found for any of the traditional forms of energy on which Americans depend to turn on the light. Electricity has become the chosen battleground for environmental groups who have laboring night and day to insure there will not be enough of it to meet our needs.

Take, for example, the exultant news release (Jan 17) from the Rainforest Action Network, “Proposed Coal Plants Losing Steam” celebrating “59 coal plants cancelled or shelved in 2007.” Since coal-fired utilities provide just over 50 percent of the electricity generated in America, one would think that building more plants would be a good thing.

The Greens, however, using the utterly bogus “global warming” hoax and asserting the false notion that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will transform the climate of the earth, are managing to deny Americans electrical power. There is no global warming and CO2 constitutes about 0.038% if the earth’s atmosphere. In past eras there was a lot more CO2 and the result was lush vegetation that kept a lot of dinosaurs munching away for several million years.

“Coal-fired power plants are the wrong investment for our climate, our health, and our economy,” said Becky Tarbotton, director of Rainforest Action Network’s Global Finance Campaign. (1) Such plants do not affect the climate. (2) Americans now have the longest life expectancy ever, so our health is not an issue. (3) Our economy is entirely based on the availability and provision of electrical and other forms of energy.

The Greens opposed nuclear energy so successfully we haven’t seen a new plant built in thirty years. If you want to reduce the cost of electricity, build a few and watch what happens. Consider what Dr. Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine has to say:

“The construction of just one nuclear power station like Palo Verde (CA) in each of the 50 states, with a full complement of 10 reactors, would supply all of the energy that the United States currently imports—with, in addition and at current prices, $300 billion per year worth of excess energy to export.”

If we can’t get nuclear facilities built and we can’t get any new coal-fired plants, what does RAN propose? The same thing as the other Greens do. So-called “renewable energy.” And “efficiency.”

Neither solar, nor wind energy is EVER going to be able to produce the amount of energy Americans use and need. The laws of physics pretty much eliminate those “solutions” to our energy needs and, in the case of wind energy, the less the better because they chop countless thousands of birds and bats to death every year.

If this keeps up, we are going to run out of energy in America and the Greens will be to blame. I hope future Americans, gathered around a fireplace for warmth and to cook dinner will appreciate what a great job the Greens did to return them to the same conditions that existed from before the Revolution to fifty years after the Civil War.