Is ‘Green’ Energy Worth Pursuing?

America currently is caught in a ‘perfect storm’ of economic circumstances that is causing high energy prices and high food prices brought on by the ultimate influencing factors – imbalances of supply and demand.

For those who have disdained economic laws like supply and demand, and who have propounded the idea that economies can be manipulated by government fiat for the common good, the current situation is a reminder that the laws of economics are like the law of gravity. In short, you cannot overcome them no matter how hard you try. If you attempt to suspend an apple in the air, it will not work. Gravity always will win. And if you want lower prices at the same time that supply is restricted or demand is rising, it won’t work.

Even the drop in the housing market showed how free-enterprise automatically corrects itself no matter what people want or think. In that case, market forces informed homeowners that perhaps their suburban bungalow was not worth the $1 million that they thought it was worth.

If you turn on the television these days and catch a government hearing on food prices or gasoline prices, you will witness much grandstanding. You may have heard New York Democrat US Senator Charles Schumer talking about average American families being “floored by prices” of food and energy.

In a recent televised hearing on C-SPAN, Schumer ticked off food item after food item and its price rise from 2001 until 2008. He mentioned items rising in price from 20% to 40% without ever mentioning that the natural rates of American inflation in this period would have caused food prices to rise by at least 15% to 25% in that period anyway. But Schumer repeated the bigger numbers in order to shock people into thinking the worst.

This is the way that Democrats manipulate statistics, particularly when they can use those stats to blame President Bush. They never tell you ‘the other side of the story.’

That does not mean that food prices have not risen substantially in the last year. They have. And it is always important to be honest in any debate about a serious issue like the prices of food and energy. But in debate after debate, the Democrats have demagogued, blaming the oil companies, the food processors, the farmers, Bush, Cheney etc., without ever looking at the underlying issues in the recent price rises. Or in the mirror.

In 2005 and 2006, many respected American economists were calling the US economy the strongest that they ever had seen it. And indeed it was. Housing was booming, interest rates were low and oil was hovering around $50 a barrel. But today, we have a collapsed housing market, skyrocketing oil prices and rising food prices.

So how did all this happen in such a short time? Just by chance?

No, it happened because several short-term and long-term market trends have been pointing us in this direction.

First, the housing market was fueled artificially by too-low interest rates suggested by Greenspan after 9/11 to prevent an economic downturn. The interest rates drew too many people into the market and pushed up prices.

In the food crisis, the world’s population is rising, and so food is in increasing demand. This will never change. Thankfully for the world, the United States over the last 100 years has been developing an advanced method of food production using the latest technologies not only in farm machinery, cultivation techniques, pesticides and herbicides, but also in agricultural biotechnology that all has combined to produce modern, high-yield, disease-resistant crops that have been adapted by a growing world.

Today, we Americans are the best-fed people in history, while poor nations in most cases have a more stable and bountiful food supply than ever before because of advances developed here in the United States.

As demand is always rising, the current food price rises also are attributable to some natural causes like Australia’s drought which has impacted wheat substantially.

But it is the man-made factors that have sent food prices soaring most, all coming out of the environmental movement.

First, many environmentalists, backed by liberals the world over and by people like Senator Schumer here in the US, have contributed greatly to food shortages by opposing all forms of advanced bio-technology. These ecologists have actually been warning poor nations, and rich nations too, away from bio-engineered food, calling it ‘Frankenfood’ and using scare tactics to make people fear genetic engineering. Despite the fact that many poor nations need food desperately, enviros actually have convinced them to deny themselves the miracle of modern ag technology.

In the recent food price spikes, however, even liberal/left Europeans suddenly have decided that the ban on genetic engineering should be eased, while the Japanese have decided same.

The second enviro-caused reason for rising food prices is the production of alcohol fuel (ethanol) from corn. By diverting corn to make fuel and taking it away from human consumption primarily as feed for hogs, chickens and cattle, but also as raw food export to poor nations, the price of corn has risen and pushed up the prices of American food, and food exports too.

Ethanol, of course, was the brainchild of environmentalists as a way to ease our energy problems, when in fact it has increased them by consuming large amounts of traditional energy to produce marginal amounts of energy from ethanol.

It has never been proven that 1,000 BTUs of traditional energy input (to power the machines to grow and transport the corn, and to process that corn into alcohol) even produces 1,000 BTUs of ethanol energy in return. Many claim that the ethanol produced is actually less than 1,000 BTUs while others say that the energy in the ethanol is at best 3,600 BTUs, or a very small 3.6 return on energy investment. In both cases, government subsidies are the only way that ethanol survives.

Meanwhile, the environmentalist-caused energy crisis is a primary reason for the oil-price spikes and the food-price crisis.

Rising petroleum costs are pushing up the prices of all agriculture through higher costs for herbicides and pesticides (derived from petroleum) and for fuel to run farm machinery, for all energy to operate food processing operations, and for fuel to transport food products from farm to processor, and from processor to your local supermarket.

Why are energy prices rising? Because of enviro obstruction of energy supplies, with the help of people like Senator Schumer in the Congress blocking virtually all new energy development here in our energy-rich nation; nuclear power, oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), oil drilling off the coasts, refinery construction etc.

So both situations – increasing the world’s food supply and its fuel supply -- can be ameliorated by keeping at bay the environmentalists and their liberal left friends in Congress so that the world can proceed in an orderly way to provide for its people.

In a May 2008 speech before state business leaders, Democrat Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said “the age of fossil fuels is coming to an end”, urging that those business leaders join in the state’s effort to produce renewable energy sources like solar, wind and biofuels like ethanol.

Unfortunately Patrick must have been reading a doomsday environmentalist pamphlet before the speech, because in the March 8, 2008 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Nansen G. Saleri, formerly head of reservoir management at Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company, wrote in an article called The World Has Plenty of Oil, that mankind has used only about 7% of the globe’s total estimated petroleum resources (crude oil, oil shale (oil mixed into rock formations) and tar sands (oil mixed with dirt)).

What is really interesting is that Saleri does not even mention America’s vast supplies of other carbon resources like coal and natural gas, which both can be converted into transportation fuel to replace crude oil, oil shale and tar sands production. This is discussed in the section below called We are Wasting Most of Our Gasoline.

Of the world’s petroleum reserves, Saleri says, “As a matter of context, the globe has consumed only one (trillion barrels) out of a grand total of 12 to 16 trillion barrels underground.”

Saleri sees a boon to the world oil supply if there could be modernization of state-run oil companies, which control 90% of the world’s crude. “Hundred-dollar oil will provide a clear incentive for reinvigorating fields and unlocking extra barrels through the use of new technologies,” he writes.

Unfortunately these state-owned companies, which represent the same kind of static state socialism that the environmental movement and Senator Schumer reflect, are notoriously derelict in adapting new technologies because these companies are famously corrupt and bureaucratic and are primarily interested in enriching a certain political elite in their societies, not in efficient production.

But Saleri has hope. He writes of modernization: “The consequences for emerging oil-rich nations like Iraq can be far more rewarding. By 2040, (Iraq’s) production and reserves might potentially rival those of Saudi Arabia.”

Mr. Saleri states, “The world is not running out of oil anytime soon… A gradual transitioning on the global scale away from a fossil-based energy system may in fact happen during the 21st century. The root causes, however, will most likely have less to do with lack of supplies and far more with superior alternatives.”

So who should we be listening to, a politician/lawyer like Deval Patrick who is supported financially by environmentalists and who says the oil age is drawing to a close, or someone like Saleri who has been intimately involved in the oil industry during his entire working life?

The answer is obvious.

Our current oil price spikes are emerging primarily from high demand and strained supply, and from one factor in particular and that is what is called ‘spare production capacity’, or those few places in the world that are not pumping oil at 100% capacity. Currently the only nation capable of pumping more oil (2 million barrels) and reducing the supply/demand gap, is Saudi Arabia which said it has no plans to increase its output.

(Thank you Saudi Arabia, after the US military saved you from destruction at the hands of Saddam Hussein in 1991…)

When virtually all the oil wells in the world are pumping as much as they can, as they are today, any disruption in supply causes the prices to rise dramatically, just as any company that is producing all the widgets it possibly can must hire new workers and rent more production space to accommodate increased demand, pushing up the price.

If, however, the United States were pumping 2 million barrels a day out of just one source, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the pinch would be substantially reduced and prices would come down.

But along with enviro and congressional obstruction of Alaska's ANWR development, other worldwide factors are causing the supply gap including:

*Falling production in Indonesia and other nations;

*Militant attacks on oil installations in Nigeria, along with Nigerian labor strikes;

*Hugo Chavez’s nationalization of his huge oil supply (130 billion barrels) in Venezuela. Nationalization ultimately will lead to degradation of the oil industry there and consequently decreased world supplies because the industry is being taken over by Chavez’s political cronies, and taken out of the hand of the private oil companies that built it, and that knew how to run it;

*Aging oil fields in Mexico and Russia are not getting infusions of new technology because they are controlled by inefficient state-owned companies that have not adapted the new technology coming out the private American and European oil industry.

(Note: Labor strikes in Nigeria, obstruction by enviros in Alaska, nationalization in Venezuela, and inefficiency in state-owned companies in Russia and Mexico all are disruptions coming out of political socialism.)

Despite the fact that it is socialists/environmentalists themselves who causing the rise in the price of oil and, consequently, food, these same people are complaining loudest and using the most extreme doomsday rhetoric for two reasons: To get more contributions for their organizations like the Sierra Club, and to get more power for government bureaucrats like the Democrat party. It is to their advantage to keep the public in fear and want.

In a typical speech about our current energy situation, very liberal Democrat US Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington State turned up the wick in a recent C-SPAN appearance. Obviously cued by her financial supporters in the ecology movement, she said that oil from ANWR that could come on line over “the next 10 or 20 years” will only cut “a penny per gallon” from the cost of gasoline. She then went on to lament the fact that “the tundra continues to melt”.

Yet these casual references to melting tundra and to the inability of a massive oil strike like ANWR (estimated at 15 billion barrels or more) to contribute positively to the oil supply/demand problem are the kind of flip feints that environmentalists spread through the media, and then publish in their own pamphlets… because they heard it through the media.

First, Cantwell's obvious implication that man is causing the tundra to melt is  being challenged over and over. The latest example was an article in the May 1 issue of Nature magazine from a report issued by Germany’s Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences that says that parts of North America and Europe may cool substantially over the next 10 years due to colder water flows in the North Atlantic.

“Those natural climate variations could be stronger than the global-warming trend over the next 10-year period,” said Richard Wood, a research scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, a British information service on enviro and weather issues.

So if this cooling is due to “natural climate variations”, why cannot ‘global warming’ trends be the same, as conservatives and others assert? Because we know for certain that earth’s climate has warmed and cooled repeatedly over the last 1,000 years, and certainly before that.

Why would Greenland be called ‘Greenland’ when it is covered in ice?

(Answer: Because it was green during the last prolonged 400-year warm spell from 900 AD to 1300 AD.)

Cantwell’s reference to ANWR coming on line in “10 or 20 years” also is nonsense. It will be pumping in only a few short years if only she and her Senate colleagues would allow it because the site is known and the technology is ready. But Democrats, and some Republicans, will not authorize it because the US Senate has power over ANWR since the drill site is on federal land.

Well, actually, it is on land that was declared federal in the late 1970s by Jimmy Carter, just as environmentalists are seeking to federalize as much resource-rich land as possible, and then to deny resource extraction on those lands even though resource extraction always has been intended as an integral part of federalized lands policy (the other part is recreational use).

Cantwell and the other senators opposed to ANWR are part of the same coalition that fought the construction of the 800-mile Alaska pipeline and the pumping of crude oil through it out of northern Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay field beginning in 1977. During the 1990s Prudhoe was providing more than 10% of American daily crude demand or 2 million barrels a day. That is one of the reasons that crude prices were $10 a barrel in the 1990s; because demand was lower, and supply had not yet been gutted by environmentalists.

Still angry over their failure to defeat the pipeline, enviros are foursquare opposed to any ANWR drilling and for more than one reason. And here is the kicker: Since the original pipeline legislation contains a clause saying that the pipeline must be torn down when Prudhoe runs out, they are seeking to run out the clock on ANWR drilling, whose crude would need to be pumped through the same pipeline.

Prudhoe is expected to run dry by 2015, and enviros want to tear down the pipeline at that time and to therefore cut off permanently the easily available crude oil supply in ANWR and at other northern Alaska sites including the National (i.e., belonging to all the people) Petroleum Reserve west of Prudhoe, a 160,000 square mile tract, bigger than the entire state of Montana, with massive petroleum potential. 

And Cantwell’s assertion that ANWR’s oil will only cause prices to fall “a penny per gallon” is typical environmentalist subterfuge. Environmentalists always drop these casual off-the-cuff remarks that offer only the worst-case scenario for oil and nuclear power, while they wildly exaggerate the most optimistic predictions for solar and windmills when in reality the truth is always the opposite.

Interestingly the 2 million barrels a day that we could be pumping out of ANWR equals the 2 million barrels of ‘spare production capacity’ that is not being pumped in Saudi Arabia, that could currently be easing worldwide energy prices spikes. The reason is that spikes are triggered after a certain point by very small amounts of imbalance. And oilfield by oilfield, we can lower world energy prices substantially, because as Saleri said, the world has plenty of oil. But don’t tell that to a US Senator or a college-kid environmentalist or a Massachusetts governor… none of whom has spent one minute of their working lives in the oilfields.

By Cantwell’s reckoning and that of environmentalists everywhere, oil is not worth pumping at all because each supply will have only a small effect. But obviously the effect is cumulative, something that enviros do not wish for us to ponder. Rational people know that oil is worth pumping, and each contribution to the world oil supply eases the supply/demand gap, which is how all the world’s resources are made available. It is ludicrous for environmentalists to state that each source only has such-and-such amount of oil, and that it is not enough to make a difference.

Ultimately, the question is: Do environmentalists wish to help the world’s people by easing the energy crunch?

And the answer is a resounding NO. They are completely nature-focused. They have no regard at all for the people of the world just as they have recommended for years that poor nations starve rather than grow genetically-engineered food. What environmentalists really are seeking to do it to make energy and food more expensive and scarce so as to methodically squeeze human populations in favor of wilderness.

"Oh, never," you might say.

Which is what they want you to think. But the reality is much harsher.

In a separate speech before the C-SPAN cameras, Democrat US Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia looked and sounded like a dying old man as he recited a litany of high gas prices all over his state and then proposed a LIGAP (Low-Income Gasoline Assistance Program) program, similar to the heating oil LIHEAP program, to help consumers pay for gasoline.

Yet Rockefeller is another Democrat US Senator who has obstructed not only the 15 billion barrels that are estimated to be under ANWR, but all oil drilling in America. What Democrats never will do is to recognize the validity and impact of supply and demand, and that increasing the energy supply will do more for poor people than any government program will, just as economic growth does more for poor people than government programs ever will.

Meanwhile, Democrats are urging that we take oil out of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to increase supply. But SPR is a rainy-day 750 million barrel supply that is intended for emergencies. If we took 2 million barrels a day out of SPR to bring gasoline down, that oil would run out in one year. If we pumped 2 million barrels a day out of ANWR, it would last 25 years. But always  remember that Democrats and environmentalists want to take the easy way out of everything, when in fact 'the easy way' is the wrong way.

Other Democrats have blamed the oil prices spikes on speculation in the oil futures market, and certainly there is some speculation going on. But markets attract speculation only when the timing is right, and the time is right now in oil. Speculators are not hovering over housing markets in withering Midwestern towns; they invest where the action is. So as investors have pulled their capital out of stocks and, now, housing, much capital has gone into commodities which is perfectly natural.

New energy sources in America and worldwide would help to bridge the supply/demand gap, and would make the oil futures market less attractive to speculation, but enviros won’t let new supplies come on line in America.

The futures market is absolutely necessary for a modern, global economy, and it has worked well for decades. Now that this market suddenly has turned sour for a few months is no reason to abandon it. This oil market speculation easily could come down as fast as it has gone up, and it certainly will drop if we increase supply.

But the very mention of “speculators” gives environmentalists and Democrats yet another way to blame faceless and anonymous  business people (i.e., Republicans, oil companies etc.) for a problem created by environmentalists and Democrats themselves.

The futures market was established to give businesses stable price regimes for future growth. In that market, they buy a commodity at a fixed price for delivery in the future so that they can budget their future accounts on a predictable cost. Futures are a necessary market component for all the commodities that we use today, and today’s oil market ultimately is controlled by one underlying factor – the supply/demand gap.

While Democrats like Cantwell and Rockefeller go on C-SPAN to wring their hands over energy, Republicans appeared on C-SPAN in a group to give not grim lectures about our terrible situation, but to offer brief one-minute speeches about the optimistic side of our energy supply, each suggesting that we can open ANWR (just a 3-square-mile site, while Alaska is 570,000 square miles); drill on the Continental Shelf off our shores; and convert our Colorado oil shale into gasoline from a 1 trillion barrel supply, which is equal to the whole world’s energy consumption since 1859 to the present.

Alaska Republican Ted Stevens recommended ANWR drilling and said that the original estimates for the Prudhoe Bay oil field was 1 billion barrels, although it will produce 18 billion barrels by the time it is pumped out.

Meanwhile Canada’s Alberta tar sands project is already estimated to hold the equal of Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves, or 2 trillion barrels worth.

Other Republican Senators speaking at the C-SPAN press conference talked bluntly. “It’s time to get real about energy,” said Kit Bond of Missouri.

Said Pete Domenici of New Mexico, “We have to do what we can do with American production,” pointing out the paradoxical nature of environmentalists’ NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) policies, which forbid energy exploration close to home, then prohibit it thousands of miles away in the wilderness of Alaska as well.

So where exactly do environmentalists expect our energy supplies to come from? Which approach seems more likely to produce results, the falsehood that “the age of fossil fuels is coming to an end” from a liberal governor of Massachusetts, or the roll-up-our-sleeves approach of Saleri and the realists in the Republican party?

Enjoy the essay below taken from the Thinking Points section of Nikitas3.com:

We are Wasting Most of Our Gasoline

Are we wasting most of the gasoline that we use today in the United States?

Yes.

Is this waste caused when we drive to work, and when we use our cars for pleasure and fun.

No. We waste it because environmentalists have pushed us into making stupid decisions about energy.

Here is how:

Because of environmentalists' irrational fear of nuclear power, the United States halted construction of nuclear plants 30 years ago. Yet this fear is completely unfounded; the number of people who have died in the last 50 years worldwide from accidents at nuclear power plants built to advanced American and European specifications is... zero.

But since environmentalists have spread a malicious fear of nuclear energy, we have stopped building nuclear plants. France and Japan today get 80% of their electricity from nuclear. Instead, the United States gets 20% and has been building coal-fired and natural gas-fired plants instead.

America's coal-burning power plants today consume 1.2 BILLION tons of coal annually. They make up 52% of our generating capacity.

Natural gas-fired plants consume more than 5 TRILLION cubic feet of natural gas per year, and generate 22% of our current electrical demand.

Their total combined energy production is roughly 770,000 megawatts.

All of this coal and natural gas is being consumed unnecessarily. If we used nuclear power instead, we could be generating this electricity thousands of times more efficiently than coal or natural gas can. And rational people have been arguing this point for decades.

Even major environmentalists have come over to the reasonable side of nuclear power. James Lovelock, the British founder of the enviro movement, is pro-nuclear. So is Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace (read his essay on the subject in the Thinking Points section of this website) along with many others.

If all the plants that currently burn coal and natural gas had instead been built as nuclear power plants, we could have been, and could today be converting all that coal and natural gas into fuel for cars and trucks. Rough calculations show that the coal and natural gas we now burn in power plants every year could be converted into the equivalent of more than 3 billion barrels of gasoline or about 80% of the gasoline that we now burn annually. This could replace ALL of our oil imports because coal and natural gas are domestic American resources. This conversion would save our nation more than $600 billion a year in payments to foreign suppliers of crude oil. This would strengthen the dollar and would lower world energy prices dramatically by reducing by a whopping 12% world crude oil demand. And it would reduce air pollution by huge amounts every year  from the coal-burning power plants.

This is not pie-in-the-sky environmentalist rhetoric about solar panels and windmills. This is pure mathematical calculation based on what we already consume.

See how these environmentalists have ruined our energy supply? See how much damage they are causing our economy? There is no need whatsoever to be paying these high gas prices. We are wasting vast amounts of resources and paying higher prices for one reason only -- because of the policies that the environmental movement has forced on us.

(End of essay.)

Lawyer/governor Patrick of Massachusetts never said a word about nuclear power, or about developing our domestic petroleum resources. And despite his description of the creation of a small number of ‘green’ jobs in Massachusetts, environmentalist legislation has killed tens of thousands of other jobs in the state, particularly in manufacturing, by driving up energy costs substantially.

Massachusetts electricity costs are 50% higher than the national average because enviros forced legislation that all new generating capacity within the state must be fueled by natural gas, the most expensive form of generation there is. These higher costs are leading companies to move or simply to close up shop (400 paper manufacturing jobs were lost in semi-rural Berkshire County alone in 2007-8 alone over electricity costs) or to refuse to relocate to Massachusetts altogether (a spring-water bottling company that was considering locating in Pittsfield, Mass. opted out after it reviewed the state’s electricity rates).

No, Governor Patrick only talked about “green collar jobs” to manufacture solar panels and windmills and biofuels. But the disastrous result so far on ethanol fuel should make us suspicious about enviro rhetoric versus its reality.

And recent stories about other ‘green’ energy projects should give us pause as well. The leading opponent of Massachusetts’ Cape Wind wind energy project, which will place a large array of giant windmills in the ocean off the shores of Cape Cod, is environmentalist Democrat US Senator Ted Kennedy, whose nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is America’s leading environmentalist. These are the same liberals who opposes drilling in ANWR.

The Cape Wind case is not an isolated incident, and two headlines in the May 5, 2008 Berkshire (County, Massachusetts) Eagle should makes us wonder how far wind power ever will be able to take us… if it ever gets off the ground in the first place, that is. The first headline said Wind Turbine Project Slows; Environmentalists challenge permits for Florida, Monroe venture

The story involved the installation of twenty 1.5 megawatt turbines (each 450 feet tall, the same height as a 40-story building) that is being challenged by environmental groups which have been opposing the project since 2004. These legal challenges have driven up the project’s costs substantially just as endless legal maneuverings by enviro groups are driving up the cost of all resources from crude oil to coal to timber.

Of the project, the Eagle reports that enviro groups are ‘opposing road construction across 12 streams on the way to the turbine sites on Bakke Mountain in (the town of) Florida (Mass.) and Crum Hill in Monroe (Mass.)’, reports the Eagle.

Here is an excerpt from the article about the project which indicates just how environmentalists themselves are on the one hand blocking nuclear power and advocating wind power, and on the other hand blocking wind power too:

‘More than two years later, in May 2007, Administrative Magistrate Natalie S. Monroe ruled against the (Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection) permit. She took issue with the standards for determining annual flood level measurements in the construction zone, and she predicted potential damage to protected wetland zones during construction.’

‘She noted that the open-bottom culverts used for roads crossing the streams would threaten vegetation on stream banks.’

This is a perfect example of how environmentalists micro-manage every single aspect of any development project. Because Judge Monroe knows nothing about stream culverts except that which environmentalists tell her. And these ecologists are high-pressure activists who inhabit every university and every town in Massachusetts, and are intervening in virtually every economic development project in America.

Of course, conservatives agree that wind energy is far too detrimental to the environment for its low yields. Ironically many conservatives find themselves on the same side of the argument as some environmentalists. The difference is that conservatives are offering an alternative… nuclear power. Environmentalists have no solutions at all.

Meanwhile, the other wind-turbine project in Savoy, Mass. was mentioned in a second newspaper headline that said West Hill on Track.

But in that article Framingham Minuteman Wind company owner Don McCauley, looking at opposition to the Florida/Monroe project said that ‘litigation might become a factor in the development phase’ of the Savoy project, according to the Eagle.

“We don’t know what opposition will appear after we apply for permits,” said McCauley for his 12.5 megawatt project.

So the question is: What exactly do environmentalists plan to do to assure a future energy supply for the United States? Their ethanol plan has gone bust; even the United Nations has called ethanol production "a crime against humanity." Environmentalists themselves oppose wind power, nuclear power, coal power, oil wells, refineries and other electricity-generating power plants.

The next question is: Is their ‘green energy’ even worth pursuing at all?

Consider the facts: Wind energy is producing small amounts of energy for a huge enviro impact. At 1.5 megawatts and 450 feet tall each, the United States would need 613,000 giant wind generators to power the nation since our current installed capacity is 1.1 million megawatts (613,000 X  1.5 = 1.1 million). That’s a huge number of wind generators and their construction alone would consume vast amounts of energy and steel since they are built on steel towers.

And here’s another problem: Since wind generators spend small or large amounts of time idle when the wind dies down, we would need to install many extra generators just to make up the difference between stated output and actual output, maybe up to 100,000 extra generators or more.

Here’s why:

Imagine you want to install 22.5 megawatts of generating capacity using 1.5 megawatt turbines. If a 1.5 megawatt wind generator is only running 75% of the time, it is going to produce 75% of 1.5 megawatts over the long run, or 1.12 megawatts. So we would need to install not just 15 generators to make 22.5 megawatts of capacity (15 generators X 1.5 megs = 22.5 megs). We would need to install 20 generators, or 30 megawatts of capacity, since they only are running 75% (since 75% of 30 megawatts if 22.5). This is a huge overkill of necessary investment compared to a nuclear or coal-fired plant which runs at much higher levels of capacity. In other words, it is a highly inefficient investment.

Wind generators also have a big, negative enviro impact. They can be seen on mountaintops for miles around. Their sites must be cleared, roads built and power lines strung, often in wild areas, for their installation and maintenance. While a nuclear generating station may require 100 acres of land for a 2,000 megawatt generating station, often in areas already developed, we would need to install 1,334 1.5 megawatt wind generators for the same capacity (1,334 X 1.5 megs = 2,000 megs), requiring 1,334 separate one-acre sites for the same installed power production. This does not include the difference between predicted output and actual output. Depending on efficiency, more than 1,600 wind generators might be needed. This could end up using more than 15 times as much land as nuclear just for the generators themselves, often in sensitive wilderness areas.

And meanwhile, every road and power line represents many, many times the acreage than the generators themselves.

So which is the more efficient use of our land? Are we willing to install windmills everywhere and build all the roads and power lines into rural areas to service them? And how about all the gasoline needed to power service trucks to get to each remote site, often on mountaintops, to service windmills one by one? Isn’t this a waste of our energy resources?

Another even bigger question is: Where should our energy investment be going? After all, we do not have limitless capital. If we did, the whole world would be rich.

To put this question into context, we should consider another ‘environmentally friendly’ energy source, a solar-energy installation on an American home to make hot water. Today few American homes have solar hot-water heaters because they are too expensive. Come up to Massachusetts and see the derelict solar systems all over the state that were installed in the 1970s when the government subsidized them.

(Question: If these solar collectors are such simple, ‘passive’ energy sources, why have so many of them stopped working? Answer: Because they are much more complicated than you think, and can easily break down and become useless.)

First, consider solar systems. They require the installation of solar panels on the roof of your house. Yet any carpenter will tell you that the last place you should be poking big holes is in the roof of your house.

Second, the systems require the circulation of ethylene glycol, or anti-freeze. This toxic substance needs to be constantly circulated through pipes from the basement hot water heat exchanger up to the rooftop solar panels. This requires large amounts of electricity, driving up your electric bills. If, hypothetically, a solar system circulated 200 gallons per day of ethylene glycol, that would require the pumping of almost one ton of liquid every day from the basement to the roof. This uses lots of electricity.

But isn’t solar energy supposed to save energy?

Yes, hypothetically.

These solar systems also are highly inefficient uses of capital and resources.

To install a solar hot-water system, homeowners actually are installing a whole second energy system in addition to the hot-water heater they already have in the basement. That means an average of $12,000 in costs, which includes the installation of solar panels on the roof (which must be removed and re-installed if the roof needs replacing) electric pumps, copper piping and an additional heat-exchanger storage tank.

And after snowstorms, some panels remain encrusted in snow for long periods and need to be cleaned off manually.  

In many climates in America, solar hot-water heaters only work part of the year. And one user in cloudy and cold Massachusetts even said that during the brief summer, he had to dump hot water down the drain to prevent the solar collector from overheating, one of the main causes of solar systems breaking down.

Is this efficient? Or does this really represent massive inefficiency and ultimately a waste of resources and money?

Should we be putting major investments into ‘green’ energy only to face rising costs and uncertain supplies?

The same question might be posed over food costs. Is it in our interest to grow food efficiently using economies of scale on large agribusiness farms with bioengineered crops and stable energy supplies provided by petroleum and nuclear power?

Or should each homeowner maintain a garden and all the facilities to process and preserve garden produce for consumption throughout the year?

What is the best investment of time, money and human energy?  Which, in the end, is more efficient?

Environmentalists will give you pie-in-the-sky answers about the wonders of a garden. But they are never practical.

Does the average American have the time and energy to grow and maintain a huge garden, and to process and preserve its produce?

Or is our time, energy and money better spent otherwise?

Should our society be investing huge sums in low-yield inefficient resources like growing our own food and putting up windmills and solar panels, or in high-yield sources like nuclear power and petroleum to fuel efficient agribusiness?

We can listen to people like politicians and environmentalists and mankind certainly will suffer the consequences Or we can be pragmatic about our energy resources and have a brighter future.

It is up to us to decide.