The "renewable energy” craze/fad is about religious zeal and blind faith, not about science. Renewable energy schemes are currently politically correct, but they will never be mathematically, economically, or rationally correct. Large scale wind and solar projects represent a victory of poetic symbolism over honest substance. Solar and wind power are both heavily subsidized by Federal and state governments, and our Federal Government is bankrupt, as is the government of California. So we are printing up money we do not have to pay for inherently inefficient, non-cost effective energy schemes which can never work well enough to survive on their own merit in the energy marketplace. Does that make sense to you?
The church of renewable energy means well. The greatest tragic blunders of human history have been instigated by people with the best of intentions, but a lack of honest reasoning ability. When you believe in something with religious fervor and ignore all of the provable facts because your emotions are more powerful than your reasoning power, that is when disaster strikes.
Nations are living organisms that run on energy. The more energy nations have, the easier it is for them to become rich. When you raise the cost of energy sky high through inefficient and ineffective energy production schemes, you weaken the nation and make it difficult to maintain a high standard of living. All of the new, hip renewable energy schemes are so weak and inefficient that they demand endless government subsidies just to exist. We are not talking about seed money for basic research, which can often be rationally justified. We are talking about every day operational subsidies for wind, solar, and biofuels to compete in the energy marketplace. On their own, without constant government handouts, they would all quickly collapse and disappear under the weight of their own inefficiency. The marketplace weeds out bad ideas on its own automatically, but we won’t let the marketplace function properly because we have picked false winners based on dishonest environmental symbolism.
Wind and solar schemes have tremendously large negative ecological footprints and are not environmentally benign as renewable energy cultists insist. Wind and solar schemes are so inefficient at collecting highly diffuse natural energy sources that they take up millions of acres of land to get the job done, and badly. Capital construction costs are far higher per usable kilowatt hour for renewables than for old fashioned 2nd and 3rd generation light water nuclear reactors. Wind and solar systems require backup power sources to provide energy when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shinning, which inflates their true costs tremendously. Wind and solar schemes do much more harm to the environment than using nuclear power, geothermal power, and natural gas. The only efficient “renewable” energy source for large scale energy production is hydroelectric power, and environmentalists want us to tear down dams, not build new ones.
Countless politicians and environmentalist gurus have promoted biofuels as a substitute for using oil, but biofuel farming has caused fertilizer price hyperinflation, farm land price inflation, and basic food price hyperinflation all over the world, while actually increasing environmental damage and greenhouse gas release. Whenever you raise the cost of food you cause more people to die of malnutrition and related illness around the world. Currently, the global starvation rate is estimated to be about 20 million people a year, and biofuel enthusiasts are responsible for a significant number of those avoidable deaths. Have they ever apologized? No! Have any of the environmentalist and government promoters of the MTBE (methyl tertiary-butyl ether) fuel additive disaster ever apologized for all of the water pollution they caused by demanding we all burn MTBE in our cars? No! The environmental movement is full of irresponsible, irrational minds falsely posing as saviors of the planet.
We need positive environmentalism that takes the time to think things through and uses reason instead of religious fervor to make decisions. No developed, industrialized society can possibly survive on expensive, inherently unreliable, weak and fluctuating wind and solar power. Wind and solar power are so expensive they will collapse our economy if we try to use them for more than just symbolic environmental window dressing.
The human food supply has been tragically shrunk by the criminal stupidity of turning our food into fuel, and we humans face an inevitable massive kill-off in this century unless we protect our topsoil from needless biofuel farming. Biofuel advocates now want us to mine our precious topsoil by turning “crop waste” into corrosion promoting, water contaminated, low energy ethanol fuel. Removing unused portions of plants that are normally plowed under increases the need for nitrogen fertilizers, which release the most potent greenhouse gas of all, nitrous oxide. Residual post-harvest crop biomass must be returned to the soil to maintain topsoil integrity, otherwise the rate of topsoil erosion increases dramatically. If we mine our topsoil for energy we will end up committing slow agricultural suicide like the Mayan Empire.
There is a very real alternative to the renewable energy fiasco. By using abundant thorium as fuel we can have an endless supply of affordable, superior quality synthetic gasoline without destroying large amounts of land, without explosions and oil spills, and without producing significant amounts of toxic waste.
Please read my web page on the positive alternative to the renewable energy hoax.
"Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor" at:
http://thorium.50webs.comChristopher Calder - nonprofit food security advocate, registered Democrat
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