Against All Energy Anywhere

By Alan Caruba

One of the great afflictions of the environmentalists—Greens—everywhere is a profound lack of understanding of the role that energy plays in whether a nation prospers or just limps along, barely keeping the lights on.

A classic case is the communist paradise of North Korea that is almost completely dark at night while just across the 38th parallel, South Korea is ablaze with light, energy, and a thriving economy.

Dedicated Greens don’t really like any kind of energy whether it is nuclear, provided by burning coal, from natural gas, oil or from hydropower. They think that wind power is trouble-free and cost effective when it is neither. They feel the same way about solar power. Both are deemed acceptable because they don’t “emit” anything. This viewpoint is not merely naïve, it is profoundly stupid.

Before we go further, let’s examine the basic facts of U.S. power, give or take a percentage point or two, coal provides over 50% of electrical power. Nuclear provides around 20%, natural gas is just over 20%, hydroelectric is close to 7%, and so-called “renewables” like wind and solar are credited with about 3%. Petroleum generated electricity is 1% and “other sources”, whatever they may be, come in at around 0.3%.

These are figures from 2009 and, suffice to say, are subject to change, but not much.

Friends of the Earth, an international Green organization, (FOE) is no friend to humanity. Hardcore Greens think Earth’s problems would be solved if human beings were not part of its ecology.

Following the Japan earthquake, FOE sent an email to its members and fellow travelers saying, “We must learn from this disaster. Tell your members of Congress that nuclear power should not be part of our energy future.” Ironically, FOE is very unhappy with President Obama and his administration which has been very inclined toward nuclear energy.

The Sierra Club, another ultra-Green organization, put out a newsletter reminding its members that it is “unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy” and has been “for more than three decades.” The same newsletter warned that “politicians who owe their primary allegiance to the fossil-fuel industry (coal, natural gas, and oil) are quick to promote domestic drilling and deregulation, as if that would make the gauge on the gas pump start to run backward.” In point of fact, it would. U.S. domestic oil is always cheaper than imported oil.

The Sierra Club just conjured up a petition “to tell the Obama administration to protect the Arctic Refuge” because “We cannot allow these oil companies to destroy the pristine wilderness of the Arctic Refuge.” Every time you hear the words “pristine wilderness” think of a place no human would ever want to live, let alone visit. And no one is really addressing the economic devastation the Obama administration has visited on the Gulf States because of its refusal to allow oil drilling to resume.

FOE recently was fulminating against the use of coal to light up the homes, businesses and streets of South Africa and was equally unhappy about the effort to install a pipeline from Canada to the U.S. to transmit oil derived from its tar sands. A lot of our “imported” oil comes from Canada. That’s because it has been government policy for decades to make it difficult, if not impossible, to drill, extract, and refine oil here in America.

The March 21-27 edition of Bloomberg Business Week has an article by Brendan Greeley that is a good analysis titled “Facing Up to Nuclear Risk.” When nuclear plants have been built as many safety factors as possible have been built into them, but it is impossible to calculate the impact of an earthquake. The U.S. has its own tectonic fault lines, all well known, but the fact remains nuclear plants have been built near or on them.

“David Okrent, who advised the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on reactor safety for 20 years, points out that reactors are designed for only a set of defined events. ‘The early nuclear reactors weren’t designed for tornadoes,’ he says, ‘until one came along in Arkansas, and then we thought, ‘we gotta design for tornadoes.’ It’s not easy to be all-knowing.”

Were it not for Green propaganda, the U.S. would not be wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on idiotic wind and solar farms that are utterly dependent on government subsidies and mandates that require utilities to use the pitifully small amounts of electricity they produce.

The same can be said of the equally idiotic regulatory mandates for ethanol that drive up the cost of every gallon of gas pumped while, at the same time, reducing the mileage and damaging to your car’s engine. Even Al Gore thinks ethanol is a bad idea.

Ironically, more people have died from wind turbines than nuclear plants. In 2008, there were 41 recorded deaths. The carnage on birds and bats is rarely mentioned by the media. Despite all the blather about Three Mile Island not one person has died from radiation since nuclear plants were first introduced.

It is surely worth noting that coal-burning plants in a nation that is the Saudi Arabia of coal do not have meltdowns causing radiation that can make large areas uninhabitable. That “smoke” you see coming from the smokestacks of such plants is steam. Water vapor. Clouds are made of water vapor.

If we were really serious about safety and the provision of more electrical power, the U.S. would be building a hell of a lot more coal-burning plants right now and into the future.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Did the Global Warming Hoax Die in Cancun?

By Alan Caruba

If you want to know the core beliefs of those who gathered in Cancun, Mexico, for yet another Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conference, you need look no further than the way one of its days began with a prayer to Ixchel, a Mayan Moon goddess.

The global warmists are essentially pagans for whom the worship of Gaia, an Earth goddess of Greek origin, symbolizes their rejection of the Judeo-Christian values embraced by Western civilization.

It is, by now, a cliché to call environmentalism a religion, but that does not reduce the truth of this observation. For people of faith, however, it did not go unnoticed that the previous conference in Copenhagen closed amidst a huge blizzard that hit that city, nor that President Obama and the American contingent attending the conference had to depart early in order to avoid being unable to return to Washington, D.C. due to a blizzard that closed that city.

In Cancun, as negotiators from nearly 200 countries met to save the Earth from an utterly false “warming”, the seaside Mexican city’s temperatures plunged to a 100-year record low of 54 degrees Fahrenheit!

Amidst the sybaritic parties attended by the delegates, the Cancun conference hammered out demands for further reductions in the so-called greenhouse gases said to threaten the Earth with a huge warming, but Japan where the original Kyoto Protocols for such reductions were initiated opted out and it is worth noting that both India and China had always been exempted from them along with “developing” nations.

In reality, the IPCC conference was the charade designed to engineer a massive transfer of wealth from industrialized nations to those, as often as not, ruled by a variety of despots and authoritarian, corrupt governments that have failed to keep pace with the West for whom the use of “fossil fuels” has marked their economic ascendancy.

Behind the calls for energy reduction is an unspoken and inhuman desire by environmentalists to greatly reduce the world’s population by starving it of the energy it requires to prosper and survive. Along with many coal-fired plants, in both India and China plans are proceeding to introduce increased nuclear energy to benefit their populations of more than a billion each.

In stark contrast, under the Obama administration, the coal and oil industries have found themselves under attack, including a moratorium on all further exploration and extraction of oil in the Gulf of Mexico and off the east and west coasts. Plans for more nuclear production of electricity have been stymied as well.

The original Kyoto Protocols were unanimously rejected by the U.S. Senate in 1997.and in more recent years support for wind and solar production that only exists due to government subsidies and mandates is disappearing in nations that originally signed onto the limits on greenhouse gas emissions. In the U.S. both represent less than three percent of electricity generation.

The Earth has been cooling since 1998 when a new, entirely natural cooling cycle began. The last such cycle of note occurred between 1300 and 1850 and is known as the Little Ice Age. Predictions for the current cycle suggest it too may last several decades or longer.

As for carbon dioxide emissions, there is no evidence they influence the Earth’s overall temperatures. Indeed, carbon dioxide is vital to the growth of all vegetation, crops and forests, and thus to all life on the planet. Nor is there any evidence to support the absurd claim that human beings are causing the Earth to warm. For that you need only look to the low level of sunspots, magnetic storms, of the Sun.

There was no science of any merit to be heard or seen at the Cancun conference, only the massive body of lies generated by the United Nation’s IPCC. In November 2009, just prior to the last conference, the world learned of the machinations of a handful of rogue climate scientists to foist deliberately falsified IPCC “proof” of global warming.

There never was a “consensus” of scientists to support the global warming fraud. What is left is the spectacle of United Nations delegates seeking to impose its control over the world’s sovereign nations through the most audacious scheme ever perpetrated in the name of science.

© Alan Caruba, 2010