This came from Salon? Dang.
And this article comes from Salon? I didn’t know they were “in” on the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy to ruin the earth, and kill off grandma. Will wonders never cease!
Get this to Rush Limbaugh, Stat!!
Hard to believe that this is coming from Salon. His analysis is correct and it is refreshing to see it in print.
Yikes.
They drilled three gas wells not more than 200 feet from a farmhouse I previously rented from my boss right on 820. Except for traffic through the property the three times they brought in the rigs, I barely knew they were there, unless they brought me a steak dinner once in awhile. The baffles contain enough noise that it was no more bothersome than the white noise off the freeway. Once they got the permits, they had three wells drilled within a year.
Back in the teen years, I drove around an old ‘54 GMC truck rigged up with butane, my dad was distributor, and I could switch back and forth to gasoline. That old truck is still on our farm and we use it to haul stuff.
The inspiration and motivation to develop new energy sources (or anything else) comes from the promise of future wealth by free market commerce. No breakthrough developed has ever happened because the government protected and restricted access to the status quo.
This reminds me of an episode of “Politically Incorrect” I saw years ago on ABC. Bill Maher was pushing his usual “the world’s ending and it’s all the evil rightwingers’ fault.” His guest Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller tried patiently to explain to him that we don’t live in a static system, and that he was failing to factor in human ingenuity: that when a problem arises, that isn’t the end of the road because smart people figure out ways to solve it. Maher just sneeringly dismissed him with a wave of his hand, saying something like, “That’s ridiculous!”
But smart people do figure out how to solve nasty problems. That’s why Bill Maher has now been moved from network TV to a low-rated cable channel.
Get ready for a huge increase in enviromentalist propaganda. A decade of no credible measurable increases in world temperatures... despite rising CO2 levels has taken the wind out of their global warming sails. The absolute failure of nearly every wind and solar project, and the absolute absurdity of using farm land to produce crops for methane instead of desperately needed food has demonstrated to the informed public that “green energy projects” are nothing but a huge waste of government money and resources. This is creating a terrible crisis for the environmental movement. They will attack “fracking” like it is the worst most dangerous threat to humanity since DDT and the nuclear bomb was invented.
Even my own father, a conservative told me that “fracking” was a terrible threat to the nation’s water supply. I had to tell him that there was no credible evidence that the new technology posed any substantial threat to the environment, especially the water supply. So get ready... the real solution to the worlds energy problems will be attacked with a fury we have never seen before.
Cheap, plentiful energy is anathema to the ruling class, because it means prosperity to the masses.
That's the last thing they want, messy, smelly human beings building houses and highways on the vast wilderness they wish to inhabit like H. D. Thoreau on Walden Pond.
Just like they made up anthropogenic global warming and morphed it to anthropogenic climate change when their predictions didn't pan out, they'll make up lies about any energy source that actually produces more energy than it consumes.
They love green energy, because it brings about negative productivity.
The less produced, the fewer human beings can be supported.
What about oil being RACIST??? They left that out. Oil is eeeevvviiilll.
I agree with several of the other commenters. The end goal of the environmentalists is LESS people. You will note that the greenies are also the biggest pushers of abortions. They can’t come out and say it (yet), but they would surely like to cull the population using standards they devised. Most of us non-elite would not qualify to remain in their utopia.
I found it hard to believe that this came from Salon, so I went to the link to be sure. Lo and behold, it was there. I was shocked, I tells ya. Then for purely entertainment value, I checked out the comments. Man, the libtards were frothing at the mouth spouting the AGW buzz phrases. I won’t be surprised if the article (and possibly the author) disappear.
One reason to move off a total fossil fuel based system is that we end up defending “sh*t holes” all over the world to protect the resource. That is, of course, while we set aside areas in the United States from development with similar resources or regulate them into non-viable development.
Biomass is a necessary development in the Pacific Northwest and the Sierras. We need to reduce the overburden of fuels that accumulate when we stop managing and harvesting the forests because of set asides and regulations to protect “ecosystems” and endangered salamander. If we don’t, they WILL lose their resiliency, burn down and permanently convert to brushland.
Income from the biomass industry is necessary to offset the costs of thinning as much as possible. Usually cogeneration is coupled with an existing sawmill anyway. Pellet fueled boilers are immesurably cheaper than heating oil or electricty. Also because of all the feel goody set asides, the communities in rural forested areas of the PNW have been plunged into poverty. At least biomass can provide a few family waged jobs. It also provides a reliable and independent source of energy if the powers that be don’t set aside more forests or prohibit the taking of small diameter trees.
The cost of biomass generated heat and electrictiy is comparable with natural gas - much cheaper than solar, wind, ethanol or fossil fuel. Hydropower is also a great source of energy but the lunies on the left are taking out every dam they can reach on the West coast.
The Greenies will have to burn them all.
Palin has come out in opposition to all energy subsidies.
Anybody else?
My best friend in High School pointed out that there is one county in Wyoming with about 500 years worth of coal in it.
They didn’t mention the hundreds of years of oil that California has in knnown reserves.
Color me stuned this was in Salon.
Cheers,
knewshound
It is.