Imagine you
wanted to get in your electric car and drive a considerable distance. It
wouldn’t take long for your car to run out of power, so you would have to have
another car, one using gasoline, to drive behind you to make sure you reached
your destination.
That’s a
description of “renewable energy”, wind and solar, in America today because
they both require backup from traditional energy sources such as coal, oil,
natural gas, and nuclear. And “renewable energy” based on “free” sun and wind
power costs more to produce and purchase. Need it be said that the sun does not
always shine consistently everywhere or at night and that the wind does not
always blow?
Within
twenty-four hours of one another I received a news release from the Governor’s
Wind Energy Coalition celebrating the election of a new chairman and vice
chairman, and read a CNN
news article saying that “The White House wants to put more returning
servicemen and women to work manufacturing and installing solar panels” as part
of “his growing list of climate actions meant to combat global warming.”
That list was a
twelve-page long, single-spaced White House fact sheet. The White House seems
to think that the states can do something about “climate change”, but the
climate is measured in decades and centuries, not whether it is going to rain
next Monday which is something we call “the weather.” And just as you can do
nothing about the rain, neither can you do anything to affect the climate
decades from now.
The White House has a problem. There is no
“global warming.” Even if you change the name to “climate change”, the Earth
has been in a natural cooling cycle for the last eighteen years.
For the past
5,000 years humans have, as often as not, “done something” about the climate by
moving somewhere else it was less of
a bother and threat or found ways to adapt. Other than prayer, there was and is nothing humans can do about Mother
Nature.
Most surely,
getting veterans to manufacture solar panels is about as lame and stupid an
idea as the President has proposed in the last 24 hours. Does the name
“Solyndra” ring a bell? It was one of several solar farms that, along with wind
farms went belly-up, leaving investors and consumers with nothing but the
sunlight and passing breezes.
Indeed, the best
news of late has been that the U.S. Senate has rejected a proposal to extend
the federal
wind Production Tax Credit (PCT) for another five years. The wind producers
have benefitted from it for three decades. The federal subsidy to wind-energy
producers expired along with other tax breaks at the end of 2013, but was
retroactively extended through 2014 as part of the Cromnibus budget bill passed
last December.
The PCT was
intended to provide what was a then-new energy industry a helping hand, but it
kept being extended and the industry benefitted as well from renewable energy
mandates (REM) in 29 states and the District of Columbia. They require that a specific amount of
electricity be purchased from renewable energy, wind or solar, producers. All
that managed to do was drive up the cost of electricity to consumers. This is
what happens when politicians get involved.
That’s a good
reason to wonder why there is a Governors Wind Power Coalition in the first
place. It consists of 23 Democratic and Republican governors from every region
of the nation “working together to develop the nation’s wind energy resources”,
but the nation doesn’t need wind energy which produces an unpredictable amount
as opposed to traditional resources such as coal.
At the same time
the President is talking about solar and wind power, his administration is
pursuing a relentless “war” on coal that is forcing the primary source of
electricity in America, coal-fired plants, to shut down. If that doesn’t sound
like treason, then consider too that the U.S. is the greatest producer of oil
and natural gas in the world and we have at least two century’s worth of known
coal reserves. We have absolutely no need for wind or solar energy.
When Obama gave
his State of the Union speech in 2014, solar power represented a pathetic 0.2
percent of the U.S. electricity supply according to the U.S. Energy Information
Administration. According to the Energy Research Institute, in 2013 wind power
provided 1.6% of all the energy consumed in the U.S.
There isn’t a
single good reason for either wind or solar power in an energy powerhouse like
the United States. They are both costly, unpredictable, and a threat to a
number of animal species. Neither the science, the cost, nor the recent history
of “renewable energy” provides a single good reason to force Americans to pay
for this “green” failure.
© Alan Caruba,
2015
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