THE OBAMA ENERGY DOCTRINE: IRAN CAN DEVELOP NUCLEAR POWER; WE CAN'T.
"We will support Iran's right to peaceful nuclear energy," the President said in Prague on April 5, 2009. In his Cairo speech to "the Muslim world" on June 4, he declared: "Any nation — including Iran — should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power."
Excluding America.
Barack Obama has long been unenthused about nuclear. As he admitted on die campaign trail in Iowa on Dec. 30, 2007: "I start off with a premise that nuclear energy is not optimal, and, so I am not a nuclear energy proponent." He told his college-age questioner, "Uh, it is true that Illinois has the most nuclear power plants of any state in the country, um, and that makes me that much more concerned about safety issues, since I have a 9-year-old and a 6-year-old daughter who live in that state ... I don't think that that's the best option. I am much more interested in solar, and wind, and biodiesel, and strategies [for] alternative fuels."
Wind is Obama's panacea. As he claimed on April 22, 2009: "It's esti- 1 mated that if we fully pursue our poten¬tial for wind energy on land and off¬shore, wind can generate as much as 20 percent of our electricity by 2030 and create a quarter-million jobs in the process ... It's a win-win: its good for the environment: its great for the economy.
Wrongo.
One reason oil and coal work so well as energy sources is because energy com¬panies can control their use to meet demand in real time. As energy expert William Tucker explained in National Review in March, an energy grid "is not a machine for cranking out electricity, but a highly tuned instrument; because electricity travels at the speed of light, it must be consumed as it is generated. If electricity drops more than 5 percent, brownouts or blackouts may occur. If it surges by an equal amount, it can damage electrical equipment."
Wind and solar are notoriously erratic. Even if wind energy could magically be tamed tomorrow to meet instantaneous demand, notes Tucker, "Our 345 kilovolt (kV) transmission lines cannot transport electricity more than 300 miles without excessive losses to heat and friction. The only way to reduce line loss is to upgrade to 765 kV. That means building an entirely new national grid ... The cost wil easily surpass $1 trillion."
A trillion bucks for a whole new grid to placate a volatile energy source? No problem! We're in Obama territory now.
In the June issue of The Limbaugh Letter ("Breaking Wind," p. 5), I reported to you that Denmark now regrets its move to wind power. Though Obama praises Denmark as a green Shangri-la for producing "almost 20 percent of their electricity through wind power," Danish wind reality bites. According to The National Post, Denmark actually uses 50 percent more coal-generated electricity "to cover wind power's unpredictability." Pollution and carbon dioxide emissions have risen by 36 percent. And a recent analysis "finds that for every job created by state-funded support of renewables, particularly wind energy, 2.2 jobs are lost." Oops. The Danes have yet to close one single, eeevil dirty fossil-fuel plant; they have the highest energy bills in all of Europe; and their parliament's Chair of Energy Policy, Aase Madsen, called wind "a terribly expensive disaster."
That's also the conclusion of the odier EU countries that tried to go "renewable" with wind and solar. According to "Green Bubbles Bursting" in the April 20, 2009 National Review, none made a dent in their carbon emissions, and taxpayers on the hook for all the stupid green subsidies were hosed, as prices skyrocketed.
No wonder Europe is turning more and more to nuclear power. Here's a way to think about it: "A pound of uranium gives you 2 million times as much energy as a pound of coal," notes William Tucker. "That means you can run a whole city for a week with a lump of uranium you can hold in one hand."
Bingo. By contrast, to create that level of energy you'd need, according to energy blogger Kurt Cobb, "a line of 5-megawatt turbines stretching 110 miles." Lovely.
Nuclear power is the safest, cheapest, and most efficient form of energy known. Eastern Europe and France have long realized this; as the graph shows, now Western Europe is on board. So are China, India, and Japan. Amongst those three nations alone there are 69 nuclear reactors planned for future energy use, with Japan aiming to get about a third of its electricity from nuclear sources by 2050.
What's Obama's mid-century goal? To "cut our carbon pollution by about 80 percent." Enter his disastrous wind and solar power plan — and an economy-killing cap-and-trade scheme. As he told that college kid in Iowa: "[E]very bit of pollution and greenhouse gas that you emit, we will charge you money for it."
So the President is intent on drowning us in taxes and through-the-roof energy bills — in order to enact proven energy duds. We're moving toward die Stone Age, while Obama gives the green light to the Stone Age Islamo-fascist regimes of the Middle East to nuke up. Ah, Hope and Change.
Hope-n-change, indeed.
If we can't kill this cap-n-tax bill, the American economy is going to take a pounding the likes of which we haven't seen in many, many years. The potential silver lining is that Obama and the Democrats who pushed it through would be thoroughly discredited and decimated in upcoming elections. But, it would be kind of like volunteering for chemotherapy when you don't really have cancer - sure, it'll scrub your system of pretty much everything negative, but it might kill you in the process...and for no good reason.
Nuclear power is perfectly safe, is used around the world by countries with lesser technology and standards than we have here, and it will have the added benefit of adding more long-term, high quality jobs. It's a win-win, unless you're a liberal Democrat who wants to drive the American economy into the ground because of political correctness.
If the Dems want to reduce dependence upon fossil fuels (which, in my opinion, is completely unnecessary), then nuclear should be the natural choice. If it's good enough for everyone else, why shouldn't it be good enough for us?
There's my two cents.
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