Now we have Thomas Friedman hyperventilating
But I would not get caught up in the anti-carbon pollution details of the president’s speech. I’d focus on the larger messages. The first is that we need to reorder our priorities and start talking about the things that are most consequential for our families, communities, nation and world. That starts with how we’re going to power the global economy at a time when the planet is on track to grow from seven billion to nine billion people in 40 years, and most of them will want to live like Americans, with American-style cars, homes and consumption patterns. If we don’t find a cleaner way to grow, we’re going to smoke up, choke up and burn up this planet so much faster than anyone predicts. That traffic jam on the Beijing-Tibet highway in 2010 that stretched for 60 miles, involved 10,000 vehicles and took 10 days to unlock is a harbinger of what will come.
Doom. I guess Thomas missed that there has been no statistically significant warming in over 15 years, and, really, since there’s been a minor 0.28F increase since 1990, despite the increase in atmospheric CO2, we can almost say no significant warming since 1990. Much of it was due to naturally occurring El Ninos occurring during what is a primarily natural long term warming trend since the end of the Little Ice Age.
But there is one more huge caveat: We also have to ensure that cheap natural gas displaces coal but doesn’t also displace energy efficiency and renewables, like solar or wind, so that natural gas becomes a bridge to a clean energy future, not a ditch. It would be ideal to do this through legislation and not E.P.A. fiat, but Republicans have blocked that route, which is pathetic because the best way to do it is with a Republican idea from the last Bush administration: a national clean energy standard for electricity generation — an idea the G.O.P. only began to oppose when Obama said he favored it.
It could be that Republicans are blocking this because we’ve seen Obama waste tens of billions on these projects while sending the federal taxpayer money to campaign donors with “green” companies. Then the companies shut down. The jobs do not appear. And then we see this
The US has had wind farms since 1981, what the left and the green movement don’t want to talk about regarding windmills is (as usual) the truth. The truth is: windmills, like solar panels, break down. And like solar panels, windmills produce less energy before they break down than the energy it took to make them. That’s the part liberals forget: making windmills and solar panels takes energy, energy from coal, oil, and diesel, energy that extracts and refines raw materials, energy that transports those materials to where they will be re-shaped into finished goods, energy to manufacture those goods. More energy than those finished windmills and solar panels will ever produce.
There are many hidden truths about the world of wind turbines from the pollution and environmental damage caused in China by manufacturing bird choppers, the blight on people’s lives of noise and the flicker factor and the countless numbers of birds that are killed each year by these blots on the landscape. The symbol of Green renewable energy, our saviour from the non existent problem of Global Warming, abandoned wind farms are starting to litter the planet as globally governments cut the subsidies taxes that consumers pay for the privilege of having a very expensive power source that does not work every day for various reasons like it’s too cold or the wind speed is too high.
The US experience with wind farms has left over 14,000 wind turbines abandoned and slowly decaying, in most instances the turbines are just left as symbols of a dying Climate Religion, nowhere have the Green Environmentalists appeared to clear up their mess or even complain about the abandoned wind farms.
As pointed out in the Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism, wind power requires the highest ground footprint of any energy source, yet still cannot generate the same power. It’s capacity factor is about 37%, versus natural gas with is about 87%, meaning that a 1,000 megawatt facility will generate about 370 megawatts. The same natural gas facility would generate 870 megawatts, yet take up less than 1 square mile to over 90 square miles for the wind farm. Wind is dependent on, well, the wind blowing within a certain range. If it is too windy they do not work, same as when not windy. The storage capacity for wind farms is virtually non-existent (hence the reason I say the research should go more into single home/small building style projects). The turbines last, at best, 30 years, leaving a rusting hulk sitting on a massive concrete slab blighting the landscape.
Eventually the alternatives will work and displace oil, coal, natural gas, even perhaps nuclear. They aren’t ready for primetime as of yet, and what all these government decrees will do is skyrocket the cost of living.
Read: Bummer: NY Times Says Planet To Burn Up If We Don’t Switch To Expensive Alternatives »
