The War On Energy

Economies the world over depend on cheap, dependable energy. If you made a list of countries according to their per capita use of energy, you would find that your list correlates very well with per capita GDP. GDP also is an indication of the wealth, the Standard of Living, of the people in the country.

Also in most countries the world over, there is a War on Energy. Now those waging the war would never describe it in those terms. They would say that they were trying to save the earth from the evil humans who use that cheap, dependable energy.

If it’s fossil fuels, then the claim is that CO2 will scorch the earth and kill all life on the planet, even though much evidence shows they are wrong. If it’s nuclear, the Energy Warriors say they want to save us from possible radioactive catastrophes, even though not a single American has ever died from a nuclear power plant. If it’s hydro – well they just don’t count hydro in what they consider to be pollution free, renewable, sustainable energy.

While they make their arguments in our name – to save all of humanity – the effects of their war, if it were successful, would be to push us back in time to when solar and wind energy were among the best available sources.

For solar, lenses & reflectors were used in ancient Greece to light torches, in Rome the first glass windows were used for the Emperor’s sun-room and eventually for communal bathhouses, and in the US, the Anasazi Indians built their dwellings facing the sun. It turns out that solar never was a best source of energy, except for niches like powering calculators.

Windmills were used in many places including Holland and Spain (remember the Man of La Mancha?). It was cheap and dependable for milling grain – when that was the only energy source available.

In a modern world Economy, dependable takes on a whole new meaning. Getting zero energy from a solar array at night and zero energy from a modern windmill if the wind is too weak or too strong, means that if you need the power during those times, your out of luck. Wind and solar thus are said to be non-dispatchable.

Fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydro are dispatchable – they are available whenever you need them. To be dispatchable, wind and solar require back up systems based on (you guessed it) fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydro. Using these as backups make them more costly to use than as the primary source. With alternative energy, I guess cost is no object.

Even without considering the costs of backup systems, the power you get out of wind and solar are much more expensive than fossils fuels, nuclear, and hydro. MUCH more expensive. Wind and solar systems have been killing hundreds of thousands of birds and bats. And, did I mention, the energy is not available whenever you need it?

They are not cheap, and they are not dependable. And yet, the Global Warming Climate Change Alarmists insist that wind and solar must replace fossil fuels & nuclear to save the planet.

In much of the third world countries, preventing the people there from being able to use fossil fuels means they’ll continue to be poor, they will live in poor health due to cooking with wood and dung and not having clean water, and they will die much earlier than you or I.

But Gaia is more important.

In the US, most people rank Global Warming way down at the bottom of most lists of issues. To try to win over more people to their views, the Alarmists do a lot of bad stuff. They ignore overwhelming evidence that first temperatures rise, and then atmospheric CO2 goes up. They ignore natural variation in climate, even going so far as to say that the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period never happened.

They declare that “the Science is Settled” and conspire to keep opposing views from being published (ever hear of ClimateGate?). They phony up/adjust data, claim that the output from models are data, and call opposing researchers names – Denier!

They say that temperatures may rise because of Greenhouse Gas CO2 – or maybe it will fall. We may get floods – or maybe droughts. We may get much more extreme weather – but they ignore the lower numbers of hurricanes & tornadoes.

They’ve made a few predictions which have disproven their CO2 Global Warming Theory, but they refuse to own up to their predictions’ failures.

Their theories are wrong, yet they continue their War on Energy. That War on Energy is making Europe poorer. If we let it continue in the US, the War on Energy will wreck our Economy as well.

Ask your candidates for public office which side are they on in the War on Energy.