Showing posts with label solar power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label solar power. Show all posts

Friday, June 25, 2010

When Idiots Join Hands ... Alan Caruba

When Idiots Join Hands
By Alan Caruba

******************
After the June 23 Cabinet meeting, President Obama said:
“We talked about energy. In the context of the oil spill, as I said last week during my Oval Office address, this has to be a wakeup call to the country that we are prepared and ready to move forward on a new energy strategy that the American people desperately want but for which there has been insufficient political will.”
“It is time for us to move to a clean energy future.”

First, let it be said that the American people do not desperately want “a new energy strategy.” They did not want Obamacare. They do not want Cap-and-Trade. They do not want amnesty for an estimated ten to twenty million illegal aliens.

Along with the totally discredited global warming hoax, this has got to be the biggest lie Obama keeps repeating, along with promises of thousands of “green jobs.”

What is Clean Energy?

Obama is referring to solar and wind energy. Neither of these enterprises would last longer than an episode of “So You Think You Can Dance” were it not for the billions of taxpayer’s dollars provided as subsidies to producers who, once the subsidies end, will abandon these most useless of all ways to generate electricity.
When the government mandates that part of the electricity you purchase must be supplied by wind or solar, they are forcing utilities to invest in means of generation that must always be backed up by coal-fired, natural gas, hydroelectric, or nuclear plants. Neither wind, nor solar can be depended upon to produce sufficient electricity, particularly during times of peak uses.

When you see those windmills turning even when there is no wind, there is a plant somewhere providing them with electricity because, unless they constantly turn, their mechanisms famously break down. Solar farms are even less efficient, particularly since the sun does not shine all the time and cloud cover often reduces their capacity.

This, however, will not deter the hoped-for thousands of people who will turn out on Saturday, June 26, to participate in some 700 events across the nation and, we’re told, worldwide in a mega-event called “Hands Across the Sand.” It is intended to encourage more “clean energy.”

“This simple, but powerful human expression of unity will send a clear message to our leaders that more offshore drilling is not the answer and now is the time to create our clean energy future,” said event founder, David Rauschkolb, described as a restaurant owner in Seaside, Florida.

That’s who we want making energy policy, a restaurant owner!
Among the sponsors of the event are Audubon, the Alaska Wilderness League, the Center for Biological Diversity, Clean Water Action, Defenders of Wildlife, Earth Day Network, Endangered Species Coalition, Energy Action Coalition, Environment America, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, MoveOn.org, Ocean Conservancy, Rainforest Action Network, and the Sierra Club.

In other words, the most mendacious environmental groups, all devoted to impeding the development and access to the huge quantities of energy needed to maintain industry, agriculture, and an economy that, despite their constant interference and obstruction, is still the world’s leader in value of goods produced.

To them, the Gulf oil spill is the best thing that ever happened. One well out of hundreds in the Gulf of Mexico has suffered a horrible failure, but these are the people who want to shut down all of them despite a fifty-year history of safety.
No doubt the mainstream media will have a field day showing us coverage of countless idiots holding hands on beaches, near waterways, and wherever else they will gather in the name of not having any gasoline to fill the tanks of the cars that brought them there, not having the electricity to power the air conditioners in their homes, not having anything made from plastic, not even having asphalt on the highways and streets they will drive upon after the event.
It is not likely to occur to any of them that deepwater oil wells are the result of the bans environmental organizations continue to demand as they oppose drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or anywhere along the 85% of U.S. coastal areas where huge amounts of untapped oil and natural gas exist.
This nation faces many hazards, but the greatest hazard of all is a President who wants to pass the biggest tax in U.S. history, Cap-and-Trade, on energy use. It is not a climate bill. It is not a jobs bill.

It is just another scheme based on the fraud of reducing so-called greenhouse gas emissions. The Earth produces 97% of these emissions. They are a part of the atmosphere of the Earth, albeit the atmosphere is almost entirely composed of oxygen and nitrogen. It is best understood as primarily water vapor!
The cartoon character, Pogo, famously said, “We have met the enemy and it is us.” You can watch them join hands on Saturday and demand a return to the Dark Ages.

© Alan Caruba, 2010
**********************
Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Worst President, Ever! ... Alan Caruba


Worst President, EVER!
By Alan Caruba
******************

Does anyone recall the first weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency? He was everywhere on the media all the time. His constant use of TelePrompters became an instant joke, suggesting he could not say anything unless it was scripted. Indeed, listening to him try to speak without them is a painful process of a very slow selection of words and very long pauses in between.

After his first press conference he stopped holding them until 309 days later when he addressed the oil spill in the Gulf. It was such a lame performance that his advisors apparently thought a speech from the Oval Office, his first, would make up for that. It didn’t.

In this age of 24/7 news coverage, Barack Obama has managed to make himself ubiquitous to the point of complete inanity. So, I have a bit of advice for him: Shut up, Barack.

The seas have not ceased to rise because you were elected (as promised) and the Earth has not “healed itself.” Indeed, it is bleeding oil at a prodigious rate, confounding BP’s engineers, all graduates no doubt of the Acme School of Oil Drilling.

What have we learned about Barack Hussein Obama? If George W. Bush was considered an amiable dunce, Obama has demonstrated to everyone he is the worst kind of ideologue, totally tone deaf to the Voice of the People. When nearly a million Americans showed up in Washington, D.C. on September 12th last year to protest Obamacare, his communications advisor, David Axelrod dismissed them saying, “They’re wrong.”

Axelrod was on all the network and cable news shows the day following his Oval Office appearance defending a speech that essentially said we don’t know what we’re doing, but we blame BP. The good news is that the president has finally found someone else to blame other than George W. Bush for his own ineptitude and incompetence.

In case you haven’t noticed, Obama’s approval ratings in the polls are in the low 40s and heading south. There is a hard core of about 30% who support Obama no matter what he does or doesn’t do. In an article by the Editor-in-Chief of CNSnews, Terence P. Jeffrey, he noted that “The middle class is abandoning President Barack Obama, according to data released by the Gallup Poll. The only income bracket among which a majority still says they approve of the job he is doing as president are those earning $2,000 per month or less.”

Anyone still making a living comparable to achieving the American Dream has long since abandoned the great Community Organizer with the exception of union members. When you lose the middle class, you have lost the great engine of the American economy.

With the exception of the growing legion of government workers, the unions had been losing members for years. They were held in generally low esteem and their destruction of General Motors and Chrysler bears out their parasitic relationship with business and industry. Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s support from teacher’s unions suggests why our educational system has been in the toilet for decades.

Every time Obama opens his mouth, his approval falls. It began with his great Apology Tour to the Middle East at the beginning of his presidency, continued with his acceptance of a Nobel Peace Prize for having done nothing notable, and plunged with his advocacy of the much-hated Obamacare shoved down the throats of all Americans.

In addition to advocating a Cap-and-Trade bill that is a huge tax on energy use, he is now babbling about a “clean energy future” that apparently involves paving over America with millions of acres of solar farms and coast-to-coast wind turbines.

Obama doesn’t like coal that provides fifty percent of all the electricity we use every day and, of course, oil that fuels our cars, trucks, tractors, et cetera.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

Barack Hussein Obama is living proof of that.

© Alan Caruba, 2010
***********************
Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.