Romney to Call for Energy Independence by 2020

Mitt Romney traveled to Hobbs, New Mexico yesterday to push energy independence for North America in eight years. As president, Romney would embark on energy independence by first empowering the states.

In what his campaign is billing as a major policy speech, Mitt Romney will unveil an energy plan Thursday that would give states the power to determine whether drilling and mining should occur on federal lands within their borders as part of a larger effort to increase domestic oil, coal and natural gas production and achieve energy independence.

The Obama administration has emphasized expensive, unreliable, and technologically difficult alternatives like wind and solar power. Mr. Obama's alternative energy policies have also been plagued by scandal -- namely, the Solyndra debacle. And the president is waging an ongoing war against the coal industry, as U.S. News reported in June:

His [President Obama's] administration, especially the Environmental Protection Agency, is engaged in a war on coal that threatens America's long-term energy security. Put simply, they want to shut down all the coal-fired power plants producing electricity in the United States and are using regulatory mandates to try and do it. Mr. Obama was instrumental in shutting down the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would have delivered Canadian oil to the U.S. and generated tens of thousands of jobs.

...to push energy independence for North America in eight years..."

Parts of North America, specifically north of the Great Lakes and the 49th parallel, already are energy independent. The middle part of North America could achieve energy independence in a very short time by:

1. Building the Keystone pipeline.

2. Drilling everywhere for oil.

3. Stopping the war on coal.

4. Building nuclear plants.

Arrghh! That phrase “energy independence” is absurd. Most of our oil imports come from Canada and Mexico, not the Middle East. We also already use an abundance of our own energy, but politicians love to scare people into believing we are at the mercy of some foreign tyrants. Stossel thoroughly debunked this notion, in his show on myths about oil and gas.

Could we have some honesty for a change?

Not a small accomplishment, should it be possible.

Energy independence calls upon many things, not the least of which would be the development and deployment of nuclear energy power plants, to give us a baseline supply of electricity with which to power our civilization. Every joule of energy that comes from distributed electricity from this source is that much less energy that has to be extracted from the direct combustion of carbon-based fuels.

Since nuclear power was first established in this country, the system of choice for extraction of the power has been the “light water reactor”, which uses uranium for fuel. But at the time when this system was first proposed, there was also an alternative suggested, using something called “liquid flouride thorium reactor”, and this process is actually much more efficient and vastly more safe than the LWR process. Some of the description of this process is described here.

energyfromthorium.com

One of the LARGE advantages of this process is that rather than maybe 2%-3% of the energy from a given amount of nuclear fuel actually being extracted, some 50% of the energy may be extracted from a thorium-based power plant. Probably more importantly, the nuclear waste from light-water nuclear reactors can be reburned, and thus disposed of through this reaction, solving what is a vexing long-term problem. There is a very much smaller nuclear waste stream from the use of thorium, and it becomes safe within a span of perhaps a couple of hundred years, rather than the thousands of years for the waste stream from a light water reactor.

We have the technology. We have the need. Just cut through all the regulatory restrictions, rather like the Manhattan Project of WW II. We went from laboratory curiosity to a working nuclear weapon in something like three years.

But there has to be the will to do this.

The Chinese hope to such an operational plant up and running by 2015.

Last night on the Hannity show, they mentioned that Obama was involved in the recent purchase of the Sunoco refinery in Philadelphia by the Carlyle Group. Everyone thought that this purchase, which would keep the last Philadelphia refinery open, was a wonderful thing, but it looks like the Carlyle Group, that purchased the refinery is a major crony partner of the Obama administration, with heavy investment from the SEIU unions in NY and CA. and their pension funds.

This is actually the first step in government control of the oil industry. Not good at all. I also read that Sarkozy’s brother is part of the Carlyle Group. I don’t know what he does there.

Here’s the link to the Wiki article on the Carlyle Group:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlyle_Group

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