Carroll - Gore's nutty idea

Al Gore proposed last week that the United States "commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years."

This man is truly insane. I shudder to think what would have happened to the United States if he had become President as he so nearly did. No, I am not saying that this man is simply wrong. I am saying that he is in this world, but he is not connected to it. He has no judgment, no wisdom, few powers of observation, and he is much less intelligent than George Bush. One has to wonder at the severe lack of judgment also generally found in those managing our newspapers and television news programs which has kept them from taking Al Gore to task for this nonsense.

Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages of the Rocky Mountain News, has correctly identified Al Gore's call to kill oil, gas, and coal power generating plants as the equivalent of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward in this editorial. This effort, he points out, would require utilities to mothball hundreds of existing plants and institute a crash program of building solar energy, wind farm, and new electricity power transmission lines, that would cause a huge increase in electricity costs to individuals and businesses. What is more, both sun and wind are highly subject to natural variations, so they would require something like huge banks of batteries or capacitors to store energy for later use, which would be very expensive and environmentally unfriendly.

I will repeat that it is lunatic to implement such a plan, even if it were true that carbon dioxide emissions were going to be a significant problem affecting the climate in 100 years. In actuality, there is no good reason to think this will be the case anyway. This makes calling for wrenching energy infrastructure destruction programs and crash construction programs of largely untried or incredibly expensive technology an idiot's delight.