Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

The global warming activists believe that they have found the Holy Grail. Witness the Napa Valley Hotel & Spa replacing the Gideon Bible in all its rooms with Al Gore’s messianic message: “An Inconvenient Truth.” And add to this the latest U.N.report (April, 2007 from Bangkok) on the same topic, advising us that by ramping up the use of renewable energy sources like solar, wind and hydroelectric power (note: they never recommend nuclear power) plus a myriad of other things we can all do around the house and in our factories we can save the world and at a cost of only 0.12 percent of our economic growth each year through the year 2030, which extrapolates to cost of close to 25% of America’s Gross National Product. That’s one-fourth of our national wealth if the U.N. is correct, and when, pray tell, is the U.N. right about anything?

But don’t sell out all your stocks and bonds, the Kyoto protocol – which is what this is all about – is unraveling at the seams and by 2012 (when most of the Treaty’s proposed regulations will expire) the Treaty will be dead. You read it here first and now for just some of the reasons that eventually cooler heads (a well chosen metaphor!) will prevail:

• Those huge windmill structures produce very little electricity (and only when the wind blows at an optimum speed). For example, the proposed wind farm off Cape Cod would supply most of the Cape’s power by using one hundred thirty 426-foot turbines spaced six to nine football fields apart and would occupy more than a 24 mile area. However, because winds blow intermittently, other generating plants have to be constantly available with a “spinning reserve” to avoid blackout problems and these backup plants still produce emissions while they are in a stand-by mode.
• Consequently, the emissions footprint of the windmills coupled with the concomitant standby plants are about the same as a conventional plant, but with a staggering rise in costs.
• The costs are hidden from unsuspecting taxpayers through massive subsidies to the wind farm developers (aha!) and paid through higher taxes and monthly utility bills.
• It has been estimated that because solar radiation is relatively dilute the complete replacement of fossil fuels by solar panels would require about 50,000 square miles of territory, some 1% of U.S. land area and biomas grown on energy farms will need more than 10 times that area.

Yet despite the constant drumbeat of the “Greening” of America by some well meaning environmentalists (and some who are in it solely for the money!) the Energy Information Agency projects that by the year 2020 wind power will produce 0.0025% of our electric generation at a price tag estimated to be 400% more than the same power would cost from oil or coal fired generating plants. And when solar and biomas fuels are factored in renewable energy sources will rise to about 0.5% of our energy needs, but with concomitant costs as much as ten times that of fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

In the final analysis, the ‘Green Dream’ is to end or restrict the use of cheap energy; coal, oil and natural gas. Consider what environmentalist activist, Professor Paul Ehrlich, held about the putative father of global weather problems: “too many rich people” (quoted by the Associated Press, April 6, 1990). Clearly, “the activist movement saw rich people as the ones using too many resources. They saw cheap energy as the root cause of the technological abundance underlying the ‘throw-away’ society. In its turn, cheap energy produced too many rich people and enticed poor people with the idea that they could get rich, too.” (From, Unstoppable Global Warming, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Copyright 2007, by S.Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery.)

Epilogue: This essay is in no way meant to disparage the host of my well intentioned friends, relatives and colleagues who believe in their heart-of- hearts that by driving their cars, running their air conditioners and buying take-out food in plastic containers they are dooming our planet to a fiery demise. Rather, this is to dispel the smokescreen laid down by a collective of environmental Luddites, bent on changing the way we live to conform to the way they think we ought to live, but in neither case will it have any effect whatsoever on global weather, hot or cold!