Posted on 08/25/2008 1:17:28 PM PDT by pissant
By: Center for American Progress Action Fund
ASHINGTON, DC Aug. 13, 2008 - Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA) voted against every attempt to increase clean alternative energy sources during this Congress, according to a new analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Rep. Hunter's opposition to wind, solar, geothermal and other clean energy sources contrasts with his participation in the House Republicans protests in favor of offshore oil drilling in protected areas. These protests in the closed House chamber began on August 1st and House Republican Leaders announced that they will continue through August 22nd.
"Rep. Hunter wins the gold medal for wasted energy due to the hours he spent agitating for big oil's ocean drilling agenda while opposing real clean energy solutions," said Daniel J. Weiss of Center for American Progress Action Fund. "Meanwhile, California families suffer from record gasoline and energy prices."
"Rep. Hunter and his protesting colleagues opposed relatively simple, inexpensive new sources of energy while thirsting after America's beaches and coasts. Wind farms can be built and produce energy in two years. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy determined that drilling in protected areas of the Outer Continental Shelf would not have a ‘significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.'"
The CAPAF analysis examined the protesting Representatives' votes on six different bills or amendments in the 110th Congress that would support clean energy alternatives.
* Three votes on closure of some tax breaks for big oil companies and invest the money in wind, solar, and geothermal energy, and in efficiency.
* Two votes to extend existing tax incentives for renewables and efficiency beyond their expiration at the end of 2008. These provisions also included new incentives for the purchase of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles.
* One vote to establish a renewable electricity standard that would require utilities to use wind, solar and other renewables to supply 15% of their electricity by 2020.
The average participant in the protests to urge drilling in protected coastal areas voted against clean renewable energy 93% of the time.
The United States has massive potential for wind, solar and geothermal energy. The Department of Energy determined that wind energy has the potential to provide 20% of all US electricity needs by 2030. Scientists found that the solar energy hitting an area of 100 square miles in the Southwest is enough to supply the entire United States with all its electricity needs via 10% efficient photovoltaic cells. Domestic resources of geothermal energy have the capacity to fully meet energy demands for a period of 30,000 years.
According to a study by the House Natural Resources Committee, big oil companies already have access to nearly 80% of all offshore oil and gas in the lower 48 states. These companies hold leases for 44 million acres offshore, but are only producing oil or gas from 10 million of these acres. Before opening the protected coastal areas from Malibu to Miami to Maine, oil companies should develop existing leases.
"Renowned oil man T. Boone Pickens is promoting wind power as a clean alternative to oil," continued Weiss. "He has said ‘This is one emergency we can't drill our way out of. But if we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil.'"
"Yet Rep. Hunter continues his devotion to big oil's demands for more of our coastal waters while opposing common sense clean energy solutions that can quickly provide energy."
Full chart of House votes on clean alternative energy sources.
He wants to extract more oil shale, more coal, more natural gas, and build more nuke plants. Did I mention he wants to get rid of the Department of Energy as well.
That’s right. Hunter will stand with what’s right for the people and America.
Center for American Destruction would be a better name for this wack job Leftist front group.
Great line. I love these stories you have to untangle because of deliberate double negatives.
“Yet Rep. Hunter continues his devotion to big oil’s demands for more of our coastal waters while opposing common sense clean energy solutions that can quickly provide energy.”
If it’s such common sense, why aren’t mean corporations doing it for the windfall profits?
Come on McCain, pick Hunter... give the conservative base a shot of whatever the most powerful catalyst in the world is
I'd say that Hunter's approach is pretty good. I'm glad someone's looking around the corner for me in 2030. We need lot's more nuclear plants as well.
Too bad he didn’t have “name recognition, charisma, and star power”. He might have been a great presidential candidate had he not been a representative.
[/sarc]
Instead we got all the name recognition we can stand along with RINOtardification.
Oh how I love the smell of leftist fear in the air! Come on JOhn, even the leftist know Duncan would be the best for America to be elected. ‘Git er dun’, JOhn!
Who do these particular bunch of crackpots think they are trying to fool?
So glad these idjits are calling attention to the summer attendance of republicans who care about the high oil prices.
I voted for D.H. in the Texas primary... really wanted him to be the MAN.
I posted the following to the article, which hopefully ruins at least one person’s day.
Propaganda attacks and show trials on “BIG OIL” obscure profit percentages in line with other industries. So-called windfall profit taxes are government fraud. Economics teaches corporations are tax collectors, and not taxpayers. Corporation budgets include income tax provisions as a cost of doing business. All oil companies face increased costs from a windfall profits tax, but would easily pass the cost on to consumers. Congress would receive the windfall profit by enormous tax enrichment from consumers, while expending no effort except deception.
Failed legislation subsidizing ethanol requires burning in our gas tanks food people should eat. We experience reduced mileage and higher prices, while 10,000’s of people starve to death in other countries.
The only price collusion and obscene profits are found within OPEC. They in turn question, as do the American people, why we don’t drill for oil off our shores, in the west, and in the Alaskan wilderness (really a desert)? Why don’t we build refineries, and allow factories for conversion of oil shale and coal deposits to oil products?
Drilling for our own oil and building refineries makes us energy independent in the short term. Heavily subsidized so-called alternative energy sources provide miniscule additions to the national power grid. The only real alternative energy source (not sun radiation derived) providing prodigious energy increases is nuclear power. Building nuclear power plants provides long-term energy independence.
A McCain/Hunter ticket would confuse me.
It is the Obamites and dems who are standing in the way of energy independence and anyone with any common sense or a shred of honesty knows it.
The mystifying thing is why nobody is advocating pebble bed reactors.
The Chinese are planning 300 such projects, the entire system can almost be mass produced.
To explain, you blend the enriched uranium into grapefruit sized ceramic balls, then hundreds of balls rest in what looks like a giant egg carton, a fixed distance from each other. Instead of heating water, they heat an inert gas that directly turns turbines that generate electricity. And the inert gas doesn’t get radioactive.
It produces a fixed amount of electricity for a set time, then when the balls are exhausted, they are dropped straight down a shaft to a storage site below the plant.
The advantages are that it produces no radioactive waste, it would be next to impossible to get the enriched uranium out of the ceramic balls to make into a weapon after further enriching it. It doesn’t produce any plutonium at all. And best of all, it *cannot* make a disaster. Even if the inert gas escapes, nothing happens, except air gets heated.
The disadvantages are that it produces less electricity than the huge, complicated and dangerous reactors we use now.
But one such pebble bed reactor could entirely power a large city. Maybe two for all of LA or NYC. This would also mean that we would no longer need to transmit huge amounts of electricity around the country on high tension wires. Yes, we would still use them, but we wouldn’t be utterly dependent on them. This means no more massive blackouts.
Kennebunkport would be a good place to start .. what's that you say ... the locals won't go for it ...
just damn
Let me see;
Hunter voted against GOVERNMENT funded windmills and solar farms and other goofy boondoggles that will build bureaucracies, line pockets of political cronies, and impoverish America.
Hunter voted for MARKET based solutions to our energy problems.
I can see where some conglomeration of liberal boobs with “progress” in their title would disapprove.
Even if they did; they would just cherry pick the words they like and create it into a monster.
And yet, John McCain truly won’t give either Duncan Hunter or Tom Tancredo a speaking role at next months RNC! It truly continues to be very frustrating how “U.S. conservatism” has been “kicked to the side of the political road” by not only the Democratic Party, but also, just as equally, by the “Republican Party leftist” at every political level! If both the Constitution Party and the Libertarian Party were not so nutty and not so unserious as political parties, then ‘08 would truly be the best chance for both minor political parties to make some serious political inroads among themselves. The majority of conservative voters would truly want and truly need to have serious, truly conservative POTUS candidates to willingly vote for in ‘08 instead of being forced to choose between two serious POTUS candidates, who are both leftists.
And Pelosi doesn't even know that natural gas is a fossil fuel.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, the speaker twice seemed to suggest that natural gas – an energy source she favors – is not a fossil fuel.
“I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels,” she said at one point. Natural gas “is cheap, abundant and clean compared to fossil fuels,” she said at another.
I just love the way the left throws out the ‘big oil’ charge. But they always ignore this one. The smarmiest big oil deal ever made and it was made by Al Gore. Interestingly, this piece was written by a left wing publication, but no one ever picked it up.
The Inconvenient Truth Al Gore Hopes You Forget!
[snip]
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=468
[snip]Occidental’s planned drilling of the Elk Hills doesn’t only threaten the memory of the Kitanemuk [Indian tribe}. Environmentalists say a rare species of fox, lizard and the kangaroo rat would also be threatened by Oxy’s plans. A lawsuit has been filed under the Endangered Species Act. But none of that has given pause to Occidental or the politician who helped engineer the sale of the drilling rights to the federally-owned Elk Hills. That politician is Al Gore.
Gore recommended that the Elk Hills be sold as part of his 1995 “Reinventing Government” National Performance Review program. Gore-confidant (and former campaign manager) Tony Cohelo served on the board of directors of the private company hired to assess the sale’s environmental consequences. The sale was a windfall for Oxy. Within weeks of the announced purchase Occidental stock rose ten percent.
That was good news for Gore. Despite controversy over Dick Cheney’s plans to keep stock options if elected, most Americans don’t know that we already have a vice president with oil company stocks. Before the Elk Hills sale, Al Gore controlled between $250,000-$500,000 of Occidental stock (he is executor of a trust that he says goes only to his mother, but will revert to him upon her death). After the sale, Gore began disclosing between $500,000 and $1 million of his significantly more valuable stock.
Nowhere is Al Gore’s environmental hypocrisy more glaring than when it comes to his relationship with Occidental. While on the one hand talking tough about his “big oil” opponents and waxing poetic about indigenous peoples in his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” the Elk Hills sale and other deals show that money has always been more important to Al Gore than ideals.
How dare he stand in the way of huge government subsidies to promote inefficient and outrageously expensive alternate technologies that will do almost nothing to meet our energy needs but will make friends and financial supporters of Senators and Congressmen even more wealthy at taxpayers’ expense!!!!
BTW, I was told that the GOP is doing NOTHING to help Duncan D. get elected. Do you know if that is so?
See post 24.
Don’t even think about it, Bayb, it will never happen.
Good.
“Duncan Hunter guilty of not supporting throwing people’s tax money down a rat hole...
Bad Congressman. Baaad.... “
Exactly! What the heck do you think you are, Mr. Hunter, a conservative??
The media is counting on the fact that the California libtards are inherintly stupid, and won’t (or can’t) read past the large type in the headlines.
I can’t even imagine that is the case, unless they figure he will win w/o much help. I’ve sent him a few sheckels, and I hope others here have as well. That apple fell real close to the tree.
ATTABOY Duncan!
Yep, that’s the man I originally wanted to be where McCain is now. Good job, Duncan! Keep up the good fight!
(- Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA) voted against every attempt to increase clean alternative energy sources during this Congress, according to a new analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Rep. Hunter’s opposition to wind, solar, geothermal and other clean energy sources contrasts with his participation )
These people are such liars. wind, solar, geothermal will NOT make this Nation energy independant.
None of my vehicles run on wind or sun and none ever will.
Oak Hills was part of U.S. strategic oil reserve, so selling it seemed indefensible then. I owned and own Oxy stock (It tanked and the dividend was slashed right after I bought it in the 80’s) and always wondered why the stock value should increase. It seemed obvious to me then the stupid government sold a strategically valuable resource for a bargain price.
Typical environmentalist suits always find some “rare” plant or animal, which must be protected independent of any damage our citizens have to absorb.
Reality check.
They are trying to permit a voltaic solar plant near where I live. 500 megawatts = 9 square miles. 5500 megawatts = 99 square miles, in other words. A drop in the bucket of our energy requirements. An eye-dropper drop in an ocean.
And an enormous waste of land.
Yes, sure, if we take up hundreds of square miles for wind farms from Dakota to Texas, maybe thousands.
And that will replace, what? Coal. Which we have plenty of.
It won’t do anything to reduce our needs for transportation fuels. They keep trying this sleight of hand. You want to drill, they want to build wind generators. Which won’t replace one single barrel of oil.
As I understand it most commercially viable solar collectors reflect some 80% of the sunlight hitting their surface. They really need to collect 80% or more to become economically viable for large scale energy production.
As I understand it they are able to produce very small collectors in the lab that are 80% efficient but commercial production is a long way off.
I’m all for alternative energy but most of it has years of development to go before we’d see it on any large scale.
Oil is what we NEED, and will help us with our energy needs faster than any pie-in-the-sky forms of energy, and will give us all the energy we need.
Newt Ginrich said we have 3x as much oil in shale oil ALONE than Saudi Arabia.
Nuke power is good, too, and will buy us more time to fight the EnvironMENTALists. But wait, I don’t think most of them like nuke power, either. (sigh)
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