America Is Running Out of Electricity

The provision of electrical power nationwide has become the chosen battleground for environmental groups laboring night and day to insure there will not be enough of it to meet our needs.

The U.S. Department of Energy predicts that overall energy demand will grow by 45% between now and 2030.

The effort to insure Americans will not have enough electricity is deadly serious. Take, for example, the exultant news release (January 17th) from the Rainforest Action Network, “Proposed Coal Plants Losing Steam” celebrating “59 coal plants cancelled or shelved in 2007.”

Since coal-fired utilities provide over 50% of the electricity generated in America, the need for additional plants would seem obvious. A May 2007 Business Week article about coal noted that, “Today, making electricity from coal can cost half as much as using cleaner-burning natural gas.” Half as much at the plant translates to half as much in the monthly energy bill to homeowners and others.

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 successfully denying 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 the lush vegetation that kept a lot of dinosaurs munching away for several million years.

The brownouts in California are testimony to what happens when there are an insufficient number of plants to generate electricity, whether it comes from coal, nuclear, or hydroelectric power.

Right now the population of America is just over 300 million. The rate of population growth is 30 to 40 million people a year – a number equal to the population of California today. All will want and need electricity. Where will it come from if the Greens are successful in thwarting the building of power generation plants?

“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 30 years. If you want to increase the amount of electricity and, at the same time, reduce the cost of electricity, build a few and watch what happens.

Dr. Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine points out that, “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 eliminate these “solutions” to our energy needs

Energy is measured in British Thermal Units, BTUs. One BTU is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2006 the United States used 99.5 quadrillion BTUs of energy for electrical energy and for our transportation needs.

What energy sources were used to generate the power? Fully 40% came from oil, 23% came from coal, 22% came from natural gas, 8% came from nuclear plants, 2.9% came from biomass, including ethanol, 2.8% came from conventional hydroelectric dams, and less than 1% came from all other alternatives combined, geothermal, wind and solar power.

Along with the efforts to stop any means to provide the power America needs for its present and future energy, the U.S. government heavily taxes energy industries and has placed so many restrictions on new nuclear and hydrocarbon power production that there has been very little development for two generations. On top of this, it has mandated that a large portion of the nation’s corn crop, an essential element of our food supply, be liquefied and burned for fuel!

The most recent “energy bill” passed by Congress and signed by the President actually bans Thomas Edison’s most famous invention, the incandescent light bulb!

If this keeps up, we are going to run out of energy in America for electricity and for transportation. The vast oil tar deposits in Canada are a target of the Natural Resources Defense Council that has challenged the granting of permits required to expand refineries and pipelines on both sides of the U.S. and Canadian border.

A recently proposed billion-dollar project by ExxonMobil to construct a storage facility and pipeline for liquefied natural gas off shore of New Jersey immediately drew criticism by environmental groups seeking to thwart access to this energy source. Meanwhile the State’s largest daily reported on February 9th that New Jersey ratepayers “will see double-digit increases in their electric bills.”

Whether it’s coal, gas or oil, the Greens are doing everything they can to return the United States to the same conditions that existed from before the Revolution to fifty years after the Civil War. The use and expansion of electrical energy did not really begin until the last century.

An energy catastrophe is looming for the nation and Americans cannot even look to Congress to avert it.

Alan Caruba

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

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Response by David R.:

You know, I've been thinking;

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

If you ever want to be deeply chilled, see the movie "Hotel Rwanda." It is a graphic, true, example of what civlization looks like in the first few weeks as its breaking down. I've been thinking about how to "get by" as these colossal idiots pitch civilization out the window. I see it coming from all sources. From the crazy greenies, to the Obamaniacs, to the Petroleumobsessives. As the Roman empire started to fray at the edges, average people started stealing the rocks from the aqueducts to make their huts. They destroyed massive, irreplacable, civilization spreading, infrastructure to serve their own immediate interests. Now, I see tweakers and street people stealing plumbing, electrial fixtures, even phone lines, for scrap. Destroying civilizations highly engineered devices to convert them to their base elements. This is what its like all over Africa. This is why they can't have a phone line or telegraph. This was what made it so difficult to put in railroads there. This is why they have no electricity grid. Now it's happening here. What I wonder about is if it is getting time to "go feudal" again. It worked in Africa with cell phones. It is much harder to protect large society projects than smaller (albeit less efficient) personal ones. Cell phones work in Africa because the telecom companies only have to protect their few towers. The average person only has to protect the phone in their pocket, not their house 24/7. Likewise, it may be time to try and inefficiently generate some of our own power with solar and wind. It may be time to make sure that fireplace works. It may be better to own a clockwork winding radio than a nice big stereo. I'm not prepared to try to live "off the grid", but that may be the future social model here in America and around the world. It's a sort of "technological feudalism," where the largest institutions have to be devolved down to individuals, because there is insufficient social cohesion to permit the maintenance of large projects. Certainly this would be the solution in a place like Iraq, where individual production resources would deny insugents large targets of opportunity. I'm afraid we might go the same way here. If we get the massive power shortages we foresee due to lack of new power plants, or if we can't get enough consensus to deal with our water and fuel resources, we may need more "personalized" systems. It will be more expensive and less efficient, but it might be all we can depend on. I bet anybody with wind-up radios, a few solar cells, a fireplace, guns, a CB radio, and a water distillation kit, was a lot more comfortable in New Orleans than the unprepared.

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Response by Jared D.:

London to Triple Daily Traffic Charge on Polluting Cars, SUVs
By Brian Lysaght
Feb. 12 (Bloomberg) -- London Mayor Ken Livingstone will triple the city's daily congestion charge to 25 pounds ($49) for the most-polluting cars and sport utility vehicles, in a bid to improve air quality. Owners of vehicles that emit more than 225 grams (0.5 pounds) of carbon dioxide a kilometer -- the so-called `G band' rating used for calculating U.K. vehicle tax -- will pay the increased fee to enter central London's congestion zone. The charge will be waived for owners of the least-polluting vehicles, Livingstone said at a news conference today.

The mayor introduced the charge in 2003 to reduce traffic, improve air quality and raise cash for public transportation. Milan, Stockholm and Singapore have similar systems, and New York is considering one.

In London, congestion is increasing even though the charge has reduced the number of drivers entering the zone. The city's transportation department reported ``a sharp increase in congestion'' inside the zone in a report last year. It said the trend reflects traffic-management changes to allocate more road space for buses and bicycles, as well as roadwork by utility Thames Water, which began a program last year to upgrade Victorian-era pipes.

The vehicles that will qualify for the 25-pound charge include: Ford Mondeo cars with V6 gasoline engines; BMW 335i convertibles and 540i and 730i sedans; and Land Rover Discovery and Range Rover sport utilities, according to the U.K. Department for Transport Web site.

Livingstone has criticized drivers of ``Chelsea tractors,'' as sport utilities are called locally, saying the vehicles are
wasteful and impractical in London. He has said he wants to provide incentives for them to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles. The least polluting vehicles, which emit less than 120 grams of carbon dioxide a kilometer and won't pay the charge, include the Toyota Prius gasoline-electric powered car and Vauxhall Corsa and Peugeot 107 models.

Since the charge was introduced, Livingstone increased the price to 8 pounds a day from 5 pounds and expanded the area covered to take in west London. He has introduced other traffic-management plans as well. On Feb. 4, the city imposed a 200 pound-a-day charge on the most polluting commercial trucks. The city also plans to introduce a fleet of 6,000 street-rental bicycles starting in 2010, a project similar to that under way in Paris, and to improve bike routes in the city, Livingstone said yesterday.

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Posted February 12, 2008 04:20 AM
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