No Plan B for Planet A by Paul Driessen

Replacing fossil fuels with “renewable” energy would devastate the only planet we’ve got

Environmentalists and Green New Deal [GND] proponents like to say we must take care of the Earth, because “There is no Planet B.” Above all, they insist, we must eliminate fossil fuels, which they say are causing climate change worse than the all-natural ice ages, Medieval Warm Period or anything else in history.

Their Plan A is simple: No fossil fuels. Keep them in the ground. More than a few Democrat presidential aspirants have said they would begin implementing that diktat their very first day in the White House.

Their Plan B is more complex: Replace fossil fuels with wind, solar, biofuel and battery power – their supposedly renewable, sustainable alternatives to oil, gas and coal. Apparently by waving a magic wand.

We don’t have a Planet B. And they don’t really have a Plan B. They just assume and expect that this monumental transformation will simply happen. Wind, solar, battery and biofuel technologies represent the natural evolution toward previously unimaginable energy sources – and they will become more efficient over time. Trust us, they say.

Ask them for details, and their responses range from evasive to delusional, disingenuous – and outrage that you would dare ask. The truth is, they don’t have a clue. They’ve never really thought about it. It’s never occurred to them that these technologies require raw materials that have to be dug out of the ground, which means mining, which they vigorously oppose (except by dictators in faraway countries).

They’re lawyers, lawmakers, enforcers. But most have never been in a mine, oilfield or factory, probably not even on a farm. They think dinner comes from a grocery store, electricity from a wall socket, and they can just pass laws requiring that the new energy materialize as needed. And it will happen Presto!

It’s similar to the way they handle climate change. Their models, reports and headlines bear little or no resemblance to the real world outside our windows – on temperatures, hurricanes, tornadoes, sea levels, crops or polar bears. But the crisis is real, the science is settled, and anyone who disagrees is a denier.

So for the moment, Let’s not challenge their climate or fossil fuel ideologies. Let’s just ask: How exactly are you going to make this happen? How will you ensure that your Plan A won’t destroy our economy, jobs and living standards? And your Plan B won’t devastate the only planet we’ve got? I’ll say it again:

(1) Abundant, reliable, affordable, mostly fossil fuel energy is the lifeblood of our modern, prosperous, functioning, safe, healthy, fully employed America. Upend that, and you upend people’s lives, destroy their jobs, send their living standards on a downward spiral.

(2) Wind and sunshine may be renewable, sustainable and eco-friendly. But the lands, habitats, wildlife, wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, transmission lines, raw materials, mines and laborers required or impacted to harness this intermittent, weather-dependent energy to benefit humanity absolutely are not.

(3) The supposed cure they say we must adopt is far worse than the climate disease they claim we have.

Using wind power to replace the 3.9 billion megawatt-hours that Americans consumed in 2018, coal and gas-fired backup power plants, natural gas for home heating, coal and gas for factories, and gasoline for vehicles – while generating enough extra electricity every windy day to charge batteries for just seven straight windless days – would require some 14 million 1.8-MW wind turbines.

Those turbines would sprawl across three-fourths of the Lower 48 US states – and require 15 billion tons of steel, concrete and other raw materials. They would wipe out eagles, hawks, bats and other species.

Go offshore instead, and we’d need a couple million truly monstrous 10-MW turbines, standing in water 20-100 feet deep or on huge platforms in deeper water, up and down our Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Not as many of the beasts, but each one a lot bigger – requiring vastly more materials per turbine.

A Category 4 hurricane going up the Atlantic seaboard would wipe out a lot of them – leaving much of the country without power for months or years, until wrecks got removed and new turbines installed.

Using solar to generate just the 3.9 billion MWh would require completely blanketing an area the size of New Jersey with sunbeam-tracking Nellis Air Force Base panels – if the Sun were shining at high-noon summertime Arizona intensity 24/7/365. (That doesn’t include the extra power demands listed for wind.)

Solar uses toxic chemicals during manufacturing and in the panels: lead, cadmium telluride, copper indium selenide, cadmium gallium (di)selenide and many others. They could leach out into soils and waters during thunderstorms, hail storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and when panels are dismantled and hauled off to landfills or recycling centers. Recycling panels and wind turbines presents major challenges.

Using batteries to back up sufficient power to supply U.S. electricity needs for just seven straight windless days would require more than 1 billion half-ton Tesla-style batteries. That means still more raw materials, hazardous chemicals and toxic metals.

Bringing electricity from those facilities, and connecting a nationwide GND grid, would require thousands of miles of new transmission lines – onshore and underwater – and even more raw materials.

Providing those materials would result in the biggest expansion in mining the United States and world have ever seen: removing hundreds of billions of tons of overburden, and processing tens of billions of tons of ore – mostly using fossil fuels. Where we get those materials is also a major problem.

If we continue to ban mining under modern laws and regulations here in America, those materials will continue to be extracted in places like Inner Mongolia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, largely under Chinese control – under labor, wage, health, safety, environmental and reclamation standards that no Western nation tolerates today. There’ll be serious pollution, toxics, habitat losses and dead wildlife.

Even worse, just to mine cobalt for today’s cell phone, computer, Tesla and other battery requirements, over 40,000 Congolese children and their parents work at slave wages, risk cave-ins, and get covered constantly in toxic and radioactive mud , dust, water and air. Many die. The mine sites in Congo and Mongolia have become vast toxic wastelands. The ore processing facilities are just as horrific.

Meeting GND demands would multiply these horrors many times over. Will Green New Dealers require that all these metals and minerals be responsibly and sustainably sourced, at fair wages, with no child labor – as they do for T-shirts and coffee? Will they now permit exploration and mining in the USA?

Meeting basic ecological and human rights standards would send GND energy prices soaring. It would multiply cell phone, laptop, Tesla and GND costs five times over. But how long can Green New Dealers remain clueless and indifferent about these abuses?

Up to now, this has all been out of sight, out of mind, in someone else’s backyard, in some squalid far-off country, with other people and their kids doing the dirty, dangerous work of providing essential raw materials. That lets AOC, Senator Warren, Al Gore, Michael Mann, Greenpeace and other “climate crisis-renewable energy” profiteers preen about climate justice, sustainability and saving Planet Earth.

They refuse to discuss the bogus hockey stick temperature graph; the ways Mann & Co. manipulated and hid data, and deleted incriminating emails; their inability to separate human influences from the powerful natural forces that have caused climate changes throughout history; or the absurd notion that the 0.01% of Earth’s atmosphere that is carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use over the past 50 years is somehow responsible for every extreme weather event today. But they won’t be able to ignore this fraud forever.

Meanwhile, we sure are going to be discussing the massive resource demands, ecological harm and human rights abuses that the climate alarm industry would impose in the name of protecting the Earth and stabilizing its perpetually unstable climate. We won’t let them dodge those issues in 2020.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate, environmental and human rights issues.

My Comments:

I cannot fathom the degree to which the proponents of catastrophic man-made global warming are willing to ignore the many and colossal failures of the predictions of their hypothesis and its clear violations of basic physics.  Ignoring reality is itself immoral, but in the name of their failed theory, they are overtly prepared to cause irreparable damage to the welfare of mankind and the welfare of the Earth's many other animals.

They want the power to pursue the GND or similar harmful policies so badly they are willing to absolutely contradict the motives they have often claimed make their environmental and economic policies moral.  The harm to humans will fall most heavily on those who have lower incomes.  They will be most likely to lose their jobs in the extraction, transportation, power, manufacturing, and construction industries.  The harm of the GND will cause an increase in economic inequality.

I do not believe that income equality is a moral goal, but I do believe that it is immoral for government to pursue policies that are particularly harmful to any of its citizens, most certainly including those with lower incomes.  Everyone deserves the exercise of their right to pursue the earning of a living.  Governments should not be constantly erecting barriers to the efforts of the people to be productive.

Those who are willing to ignore the reality of physics and the scientific method are also willing to ignore every rational moral principle.  We see that very clearly in the policies of those who insist upon using force justified by a demonstrated false hypothesis to do horrible damage to the people and other animals of this Earth.

Soaking Electricity Customers with Taxes in Maryland

I just received my January electricity bill for electricity used in the 33 days from 5 December 2013 to 7 January 2014 for my laboratory.  The total BG&E bill was for $158.20, which was a very small bill compared to months when we are running air conditioning.  Our heating is with natural gas.  The bill breaks down as follows:

BG&E Distribution and Account Services = $119.92
Electricity Generation Charges = $16.08
Maryland Taxes = $22.20

My laboratory paid 1.38 times more in taxes than it paid for the actual generation of the electricity we used!  Taxes were 14.0% of my total bill.

Of these taxes, the biggest single tax is the Maryland Universal Service Program charge which is a flat monthly fee of $10.29 to provide welfare aid to the poor.  Interestingly, this fee of $10.29 is also subjected to the 6% sales tax, so this is really a charge of $10.91 each month.  Note that this is discriminatory against very small businesses, since it is a fixed fee.  It is also, as are other charges on the bill, a disincentive to reduce one's energy use since it is not proportional to energy use.

Another tax is the Francise Tax, which is proportional to the number of kWh used.  That tax is also subjected to the 6% sales tax!  The remaining tax is an Environmental Surcharge, which was the only tax not subjected to the 6% sales tax.

The 14% taxation is not the whole story.  The state of Maryland buys into the same ideas on energy that Obama does.  Gov. Martin O'Folley does everything he can to increase energy costs.  BG&E and electricity generation companies have to pay the high costs of the solar and wind generation schemes favored by the Progressive Elitists, as well as biomass fuels.  Fortunately, these increased costs have been offset by the lowered cost of natural gas and a program which allows one to buy electricity supplied by companies other than BG&E.

Obama NASA Adjusts Temperatures Again to Increase Rate of Rise

The claim that global temperatures are rising at unprecedented and disastrous rates due to fossil fuel use lies at the root of numerous Obama policies harmful to our economy.  Among them are:

• Forcing coal-fired power plants to implement much more rigorous efforts to remove trace amounts of mercury and to sequester CO2 emissions.  Though these regulations are not to take effect until after the election, they are forcing the shutdown of power plants and coal mining operations now.
• The refusal to approve the building of the Keystone XL pipeline.
• The slowdown and minimization of permits to develop oil and gas on federal lands, which are extremely large areas of the Western US.
• The prohibition of offshore leases off the Pacific, Atlantic, and Eastern Gulf of Mexico.
• New federal regulations on fracking which were issued in April.
• New regulations on emissions from refineries, causing them new expenses.
• The new CAFE requirement that cars and light-duty trucks must average 54.5 mpg by 2025.
• Heavy subsidies for electric cars that no one wants even given the subsidy, thereby forcing DOD and other government agencies to buy these undesirable cars.
• Heavy subsidies and mandates requiring the use of electricity from wind, solar, biomass and other green energy which are greatly increasing electricity costs and decreasing the electric grid reliability.

These policies are all made to seem more justified if the rate of the temperature increase in the more recent years can be enhanced and prior temperatures can be suppressed.  In light of this, Randell Hoven very recently discovered that NASA changed their database of global temperatures, once again, going back to 1880.   Some time between early July and September 2012, NASA changed the entire temperature record going back to 1880, with no announcement and no statement with the database.  The biggest changes were to the data prior to 1963 and those changes were generally decreases in the temperature.  The post-1963 temperatures were mostly increased.  This caused the 131-year trend to increase from 0.60 to 0.64 C per century.  While this is a small change, it replicates many earlier temperature adjustments, which generally depressed the earlier temperatures and raised the more recent temperatures.  There appears to be a systematic bias in the temperature adjustments.

Note that the direction of these changes seems very improbable. One would think one of the biggest effects that would require temperature adjustments would be the urban heat island effect.  The population around the world has generally increased greatly since 1880, so there should be downward corrections to compensate for that effect on weather stations in populated areas as the populations grow.  The urban heat island effect adjustments should be all the greater on recent temperature data since many rural temperature stations have been removed from the sensing system and urban stations are now a much increased fraction of the stations submitting data.  Among my earlier posts dealing with the problems of urban heat island effects and adjustments to skew the record toward greater relative temperature increases in recent times are those here, here, here, here, and here.

Hoven notes that despite the temperature changes, the first 8 months of 2012 make it the tenth hottest year in the 131 year record, every month of 1998 was hotter than the corresponding month of 2012, except for tied records in May, and the global trend since 2002 is one of cooling.  And Antarctica has the highest sea ice record ever observed.

The pressure on the Obama NASA to make temperature adjustments to help justify his many economy killing actions might well be very severe in these final weeks before the November election.  At this point, after years of opaqueness on the part of the Obama administration, it is no surprise to have another surprise adjustment of the temperature record to hype the alarmist claims of catastrophic man-made global warming.  After all, one really does need a justification for putting hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of people out of work or preventing them from getting the jobs that would be created if we took good advantage of America's abundant fossil fuel energy resources.  For more on how abundant our fossil fuel resources are, see here, here, and here.

Regional Electricity Sources in 2008

The 2008 power sources for electricity in the Pennsylvania - New Jersey - Maryland Interconnection Region according to Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. are:

Coal 51.2%
Nuclear 33.2%
Natural Gas 6.4%
System Mix 4.3%
Oil 0.3%
Renewable Energy 4.7%

The breakdown on the renewable energy is:

Hydroelectric 2.8%
Wood or Biomass 1.5%
Captured Methane Gas 0.3%
Solid Waste 0.1%

Geothermal, solar, and wind are all reported as 0.0%. Clearly this mid-Atlantic region is going to be in a heap of trouble when Obama bankrupts the coal-fired electric power plants! My laboratory is going to be in a heap of trouble with much less power, erratic power, and much more expensive power. Our electric bill is one of our bigger expenses each month already. As I have complained here before, we have suffered from unreliable power over the last few years thanks to childish Maryland policies in regulating the power utility companies. Since those problems were brought on largely by energy cost increases and the desire of state government to shield the voters from the consequences, imagine what Gov. O'Folley's mandates for more alternative energy and Obama's similar mandates are going to do to the power costs and availability in the future throughout this area.

We have a future it is awful to contemplate. However much each politician waves his magic wand, the portion of our power coming from solar and wind power will not become impressive. It will remain puny, since each is too unreliable and too expensive. Of course, it might be that I am wrong and one or both of these politicians is such a great scientist and businessman that he will develop cheap, reliable alternative energy in the nick of time. If you are one of their supporters, you might hold your breath until they do. I am not obligated to do so, since I have consistently noted that these men are so little able to recognize reality that it is very fair to assess them as insane.

The situation will not be very different in many, in fact most, other areas of the U.S. Coal is cheap and reliably available and natural gas is a very serviceable adjunct. Both create CO2 when burned, so both sources will be condemned or made outlandishly expensive with CO2 scrubbing requirements. All this destruction is justified with a false theory that emissions of CO2 due to man's use of fossil fuels are causing a catastrophic global warming. In fact, natural forces have caused the preponderance of such warming as has occurred globally and urban heat island effects have made that warming appear much greater than it has actually been. Not that such warming as has occurred should not be welcome. The CO2 should also be welcomed as further plant fertilizer. But, no, the alarmist religion requires that the activities of man be shrouded in guilt, so warmth and healthy plants are both painted catastrophes.

Obama: I Want Electricity Costs to Go Up, Up

A tape from earlier this year has surfaced in which Obama pledges to make it so expensive to operate a coal-fired power station that anyone building one will go bankrupt. Presumably HIS plan to heavily tax plants for their CO2 emissions will bankrupt already built power plants as well. Those who mine coal and transport it will lose their jobs in droves. Such a tax will also have to apply to natural gas and to oil-fired power plants, though they emit somewhat less CO2 per BTU of energy. Perhaps this means that some natural gas and oil-fired power plants will survive the socialist Obama's attack upon industrial society and upon the comforts of our homes.

But, these costs have to be passed on to consumers, ....or, the electric companies will hemorage money and will soon be unable to keep generating electricity. Their electricity distribution systems will age and deteriorate. The power companies will not be able to afford to replace old transformers and old, corroded power cables. Power delivery will become ever more unreliable.

Presently, 50% of our electric power is generated from coal, which is also the cheapest source of electricity except for hydroelectric power. Natural gas produces another 20% of our electricity. What does Obama intend to replace 50 to 70% of our electricity generation plants with? Taxpayer subsidized wind and solar power! What a Joker you are Obama! Where is Batman when you need him?

Old people on fixed incomes will not be able to afford to cool and heat their homes. Obama will create new federal programs to provide heat and air-conditioning to those HE favors and the rest of us will be taxed and taxed to pay for their power use. American industries power costs will skyrocket and they will not be able to compete in the world market. The unreliable delivery of power will cost companies huge amounts of money in downtime, destroyed product, and procedures that will have to be redone. American jobs will disappear. A few jobs in alternative energy industries will be generated by tax subsidies, but millions more jobs will be lost. Americans will be hurting as much when they pay their electric bills each month as they did when they were paying $60 or more to fill up their car tank. Of course, with no drilling in the U.S. in places that actually have oil being allowed, the cost of filling your gas tank will increase again.

Why will we have these added taxes on the use of energy? The reason is a completely unproven hypothesis that CO2 emissions will cause catastrophic global warming. Well, we have had increased CO2 for the last 10 years and the temperature has not increased. In the history of the world, much higher CO2 emissions have often occurred during ice ages. Often times they occur as the result of a previous warming of the oceans, which then start emitting more CO2. In any case, most people would benefit from a slight warming, if it were to result. Growing seasons would be longer. Fewer people would want to move to Arizona and Florida. Some warming is not a catastrophe, contrary to the hype.

In fact, now that we are in a sunspot cycle with very low sunspot activity and the next cycle is likely to be long and of very low sunspot activity, the earth is much more likely to cool off. Such a low sunspot activity period is thought to have caused the Little Ice Age. It is particularly insane to pursue drastically damaging economic and tax policies with an already weak economy for the wrongheaded reason of preventing global warming when the earth is not warming and is probably going to be cooling!

Barack Obama is both insane and insanely destructive. HE is anti-capitalism and anti-individual. HE is thoroughly a dogmatic socialist with no understanding of reality. But, HE is a brilliant demogogue and a strangely effective liar. It is clearly a victory of our socialist public schools and our universities that HE is taken seriously and that HIS nonsense is not widely unmasked. Most of our younger people simply have no reasoning ability anymore and are easy victims to carnivores such as HIM. African Americans, who have largely adopted a culture with little regard for learning and knowledge, are following HIM in droves. Unfortunately, HE is so lacking in understanding and wisdom, that HIS presidency will soon be regarded by most as even worse than the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter. The first Black president will be so completely an otherworldly being that the apparent triumph for African Americans will be an American Tragedy. And this is a shame, especially since there are African Americans who would be good presidents.

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.

An Evaluation of What Americans Think About Energy

As we saw in the last post, most Americans are angry about high energy prices. They should be. However, the important thing is for them to understand who they should be angry at. They could be angry at the inefficient national oil companies in most of the oil-exporting countries, but there is little they can do about that. The most constructive anger is anger directed at Congress for setting up obstacles to oil and gas production in the United States. They have prevented the drilling for oil in ANWR for 13 years, thereby making at least 10 billion barrels of oil unavailable to us now. Off-shore Alaskan waters near AMWR hold at least another 19 billion barrels of oil. Until further development of these fields is undertaken, we will probably underestimate the amount of oil in them. There are thought to be a conservative 90 billion barrels of oil on the continental shelf that Congress has put off-limits.

Meanwhile, those in Congress who oppose drilling say that the oil companies already have leases they are not producing oil from. True, leases are often bought before anyone is sure whether they have oil on them or not. If they do, the leasing company has to figure out whether there is a way to retrieve it profitably after a big investment is made to get at it. With oil prices as high as they are now, much oil which could not be recovered at $30/barrel prices can be economically produced, but the investments are huge and one also has to know that the price of oil will not again be $30/barrell one year from now. In addition, there are huge costs in satisfying the EPA about pollution protections and the process can take many years to work through. Congress could expedite the time to production by speeding up the EPA approval process.

One might say there is some price gouging by OPEC on oil, but then we set them up to be able to do it by minimizing our own drilling for oil. We chose to make them the only major source for oil in the world market. The best plan is to pursue as much oil drilling, gas production, and alternative fuel production as possible in the U.S. and the remainder of the world. We can also do better in insulating our homes, installing more energy-efficient furnaces and refrigerators, making engines more fuel efficient, and pursuing many other wise personal choices in light of the present high cost of energy. Such choices will either bring the prices of fuel down or at least keep them from continuing to grow. It is interesting to note that Americans have been putting engines into their cars which have much higher horsepower ratings in recent years and that this uses more additional gasoline even than the SUVs on the road. There are many reasons why Americans should be a bit angry at themselves as well as at Congress!

The criticism that the federal government is not doing enough is more heavily leveled at the President than it should be. It is primarily Congress that has not done enough. But Congress' role is to get off the backs of those who want to produce energy. It should not be for them to pick winners and losers. They should not be subsidizing solar and wind, while restricting coal, oil, and gas. This would be especially foolish given that solar and wind are likely to remain secondary sources of energy for decades yet. They are too seasonal and irratic in their output within a given day or week to be counted upon for large portions of our energy needs. At the present time, their total output is minuscle compared to coal, oil, and gas, or even compared to nuclear, despite no new nuclear power plant having been built in the U.S. in 30 years. Wind, solar, and geothermal power will all add to our total available power generation capacity over the next few decades, but they are very unlikely to overtake coal, oil, and natural gas.

The idea of the 5-year moratorium on coal-fired power plants is a great one if you want to live with random, rolling black-outs of power. That will surely happen unless instead we have a massive effort to build nuclear power plants. I expect it will happen unless we build many of both coal and nuclear power plants. The population is growing and people are buying more and more plasma TVs, which use four times as much power as a conventional TV did. Curiously, these same people are convinced that the U.S. should lead an effort to reduce the use of energy to prevent a catastrophic global warming which is not even occurring.

So, are those who want improved home-efficiency standards going to impose the added initial cost upon new home buyers only or are they going to have government inspectors inspect every home in America and condemn it unless it is brought up to some new energy-efficiency code within a short period of time? What on earth are they thinking here? Will grandmothers be thrown out of their homes and into the streets? Will children live with their parents until they are 30 years old as they try to scrounge up the added money to qualify for the down-payment on a much more expensive home? New business start-ups will be hit by higher first and last month rent payments due to the added insulation costs, though in time they will save money on their energy bills. Commercial building companies will have some larger construction costs and insulation upgrade costs on older commercial buildings.

Finally, I love the 56% of Americans who believe that steps taken to curb global warming will create new jobs and investment. Of course they will! But,....the big question is will they produce as many new jobs as they will destroy? Will they create more new investment and wealth than they will destroy? The answer is that they will not create as much as they will destroy, because government action is only required when one intends to destroy rather than create. The people acting as individuals are the path to efficient creation. Government is the path to destruction. The usual inducements to making money will create whatever energy is needed, if the destructive power of government does not climb upon the backs of the individuals who would create that wealth of power. Subsidies from government are always inclined to become the boondoggles such as the ethanol subsidies have become. Decades of government sponsored research into alternative energy sources has done little to produce significant power capacity using alternative energy.

There is no forseeable path to energy independence for America. Our best policy is to pursue many sources of energy both by type and by source. We need to develop more oil and gas fields within the United States and wherever else in world there is oil or gas to be found. We need to start building nuclear power plants again and to continue to build coal-fired power plants, using suitable stack cleaning processes, but not worrying too much about CO2 production, because it does not much matter. Wherever wind, geothermal, tidal, and solar power production make economic sense, then the free market should be allowed to install such power plants, even though they will amount to only minor contributors to our total power needs. Meanwhile, people do tend to under-insulate their attics, to buy bigger car engines than they have a need for, to brake late rather than take their foot off the gas earlier, and forget to turn out lights they are not using. There are many ways to conserve expensive energy, but these are best left to the free market, rather than some government coercive programs.

What Americans think about energy

The Civil Society Institute working with the Citizens Lead for Energy Action Now conducted several polls to establish what Americans think about energy. I will summarize the results here, based on an editorial in the 7 July 2008 Washington Times, and then in a later post I will discuss what I think about these opinions. The results of the polls were:

• 76% of Americans are very angry or somewhat angry about the price of gasoline and expect to pay $5/gal. by Labor Day.
• 89% of the Americans angry about gas prices believe there is a great deal or some price gouging.
• 62% said rising gasoline and other fuel prices were their chief economic concern.
• 90% say the federal government is not doing enough to bring down energy prices and to decrease American dependence upon Middle East energy sources.
• 90% believe an energy policy that promoted clean power would encourage innovation, create new jobs, and make the economy stronger. The U.S. would also be able to reduce interactions with unstable and hostile countries while reducing greenhouse gases.
• 90% said that energy-related issues such as gasoline prices, home heating oil prices, global warming, and energy independence will be important when they vote.
• 90% say we should phase out use of fossil fuels and replace them with clean, renewable energy, such as wind and solar electricity and use hybrid and clean diesel technologies for cars.
• Three out of four Americans would support a 5-year moratorium on building new coal-fired energy plants if there were increased investment in clean, safe renewable energy such as wind and solar and improved home energy-efficiency standards.
• 82% believe the U.S. should lead on the issue of global warming.
• Only 15% believed that steps to reduce global warming would hurt the U.S. economy. 56% thought it would create new jobs and investments.

These results show a considerable degree of confusion on the part of Americans on issues relating to energy and its use.