Posted on 05/26/2010 6:18:01 AM PDT by Kaslin
I ride my bike to work. It seems so pure.
We're constantly urged to "go green" -- use less energy, shrink our carbon footprint, save the Earth. How? We should drive less, use ethanol, recycle plastic and buy things with the government's Energy Star label.
But what if much of going green is just bunk? Al Gore's group, Repower America, claims we can replace all our dirty energy with clean, carbon-free renewables. Gore says we can do it within 10 years.
"It's simply not possible," says Robert Bryce, author of "Power Hungry: The Myths of 'Green' Energy." "Nine out of 10 units of power that we consume are produced by hydrocarbons -- coal, oil and natural gas. Any transition away from those sources is going to be a decades-long, maybe even a century-long process. ... The world consumes 200 billion barrels of hydrocarbons per day. We would have to find the energy equivalent of 23 Saudi Arabias."
Bryce used to be a left-liberal, but then: "I educated myself about math and physics. I'm a liberal who was mugged by the laws of thermodynamics."
Bryce mocked the "green" value of my riding my bike to work:
"Let's assume you saved a gallon of oil in your commute (a generous assumption!). Global daily energy consumption is 9.5 billion gallons. ... So by biking to work, you save the equivalent of one drop in 10 gasoline tanker trucks. Put another way, it's one pinch of salt in a 100-pound bag of potato chips."
How about wind power?
"Wind does not replace oil. This is one of the great fallacies, and it's one that the wind energy business continues to promote," Bryce said.
The problem is that windmills cannot provide a constant source of electricity. Wind turbines only achieve 10 percent to 20 percent of their maximum capacity because sometimes the wind doesn't blow.
"That means you have to keep conventional power plants up and running. You have to ramp them up to replace the power that disappears from wind turbines and ramp them down when power reappears."
Yet the media rave about Denmark, which gets some power from wind. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says, "If only we could be as energy smart as Denmark."
"Friedman doesn't fundamentally understand what he's talking about," Bryce said.
Bryce's book shows that Denmark uses eight times more coal and 25 times more oil than wind.
If wind and solar power were practical, entrepreneurs would invest in it. There would be no need for government to take money from taxpayers and give it to people pushing green products.
Even with subsidies, "renewable" energy today barely makes a dent on our energy needs.
Bryce points out that energy production from every solar panel and windmill in America is less than the production from one coal mine and much less than natural gas production from Oklahoma alone.
But what if we build more windmills?
"One nuclear power plant in Texas covers about 19 square miles, an area slightly smaller than Manhattan. To produce the same amount of power from wind turbines would require an area the size of Rhode Island. This is energy sprawl." To produce the same amount of energy with ethanol, another "green" fuel, it would take 24 Rhode Islands to grow enough corn.
Maybe the electric car is the next big thing?
"Electric cars are the next big thing, and they always will be."
There have been impressive headlines about electric cars from my brilliant colleagues in the media. The Washington Post said, "Prices on electric cars will continue to drop until they're within reach of the average family."
That was in 1915.
In 1959, The New York Times said, "Electric is the car of the tomorrow."
In 1979, The Washington Post said, "GM has an electric car breakthrough in batteries, now makes them commercially practical."
I'm still waiting.
"The problem is very simple," Bryce said. "It's not political will. It's simple physics. Gasoline has 80 times the energy density of the best lithium ion batteries. There's no conspiracy here of big oil or big auto. It's a conspiracy of physics."
GREEN=it does not work
Can we shut down volcanoes? Didn’t think so.
GREEN = an excuse to control you
Human produced CO2 contributes 0.117% to the earth’s greenhouse effect.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute will bestow the Julian Simon Award on Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick for their efforts in debunking Mann's hockey stick at CEI's 2010 Dinner, June 17 at Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill 400 New Jersey Ave. NW Washington, DC 20001.
Gosh, almost as if gasoline/oil were put here for us to use...
amazing.
I wonder what, exactly, is a "carbon-free renewable"? Given how ubiquitous carbon compounds are--they even form the basis of our biology--I wonder if it's even possible to avoid carbon use?
Why do we want to go green? Because it's "carbon neutral"?
So what? What's wrong with carbon?
It causes Global Warming? Well -- A) Humans contribute (as you indicate) a vanishingly small part of the world's CO2 and B) Global Warming is a fraud and is not taking place
The whole "green technology" paradigm is built on smoke and mirrors. There's no reason to even try to go in that direction. As Stossel points out -- if this stuff really made any sense, businesses would be lining up to "go green" and government subsidies would not be needed.
The whole thing is a massive fraud.
It's a religion. It has all the components of a religion, for those who lack the real thing.
“Green” is simply a religion worshiping nature.
It’s part of God’s judgement on a nation.
See Romans 1:18-
God gives the nation and the nation’s people over to worship of creation, defiling themselves in one another, etc. Sound familiar?
Ping
LOL! Electric cars! The "next big thing" since 1915!
Yesterday, on my 20 mile commute to work, in my SUV, I saw some recreational bikers. “Idiots!”, I hollered at them and flashed my lights at on-coming traffic to warn them. Windy, hilly road where in places you have to blindly creep around curves because you can’t see what’s ahead and the roadway so narrow it doesn’t have a center line with bar ditches and trees right at the edge of the pavement so there’s no room for error. Bikers are hazards. When one gets hit, the courts will claim it’s the driver’s fault and he’ll have to live with it the rest of his life.
With the Democrats in control of Congress, legislation will be introduced to re-write the Laws of thermodynamics so that hydrocarbon fuels will no longer have an unfair advantage.
PFFTTTTH!!! And a big razzberry for all the “green” folks.
The ECONOMIC reason for anybody to adopt ANY new technology, is that it is CHEAPER to use the new technology than that which it replaced. Kerosene from oil wells provided a much better and cheaper light source than either whale oil lamps or beeswax candles. Kerosene as a light source was displaced by the introduction of the incandescent light bulb and access to electricity.
That the introduction of kerosene as a substitute for candles and whale blubber meant much less reliance on what were fast becoming very scarce resources, and that the introduction and distribution of electricity meant a much lower cost of making power available to many more people, leading to a vast increase in the total amount of wealth in the world, is lost on the equalitarians. This extension of technology is NOT a zero-sum game, in which a limited amount of wealth is divided up more or less fairly among the total number of persons, but an ever-expanding pie, in which more wealth is continuously created, by evolving technology and new uses for old resources.
Which is a good thing, because there are more people being created all the time, therefore ever-greater quantities of wealth must be generated, else we shall all fall into poverty. And the conversion of energy to useful product is the measure of wealth. The use of electrically-powered machinery, for instance, multiplies the productivity of one person many times over what mere simple repetitive labor ever could. And how do we produce electricity?
Not by pixie dust, that is for sure. Energy comes from releasing the power bound up in hydrocarbons, by burning, and the release of carbon dioxide.
Despite rulings to the contrary, carbon dioxide is NOT a pollutant, and attempts to picture the substance as being so, are either displaying willful ignorance, or knowingly propagating a falsehood. Carbon dioxide is so bound up in our very life processes, it cannot ever be disentangled. We are a carbon-based life form, for cat’s sake, and plants NEED carbon dioxide to even exist. Carbon dioxide is an essential part of the life cycle of all humanity, the entire animal kingdom, the entire plant kingdom and a great many inorganic reactions that take place in the earth’s crust, oceans, atmosphere, and the interior of the planet, and MUST be preserved at all costs.
Water vapor is from some twenty to over 100 times as potent a “greenhouse gas” as carbon dioxide could ever be. And it would be totally pointless to regulate water vapor.
I have a windmill, got it because it looked like it would make most of our electricity. Seeing O was threatening to tax the daylights out of us, we thought it would be a hedge on that. NOT!!! We live on a hill that gets lots of wind. They are not cost effective. We make about 1/4 to 1/3 of our electricity. Deep well water pump is the most costly thing we use. It's close to 1/3 of our electric bill. Or bill usually runs around 185, give or take. Now it's running around 145. Big deal. We paid $11,000 for the windmill after tax rebate. It'll take us about 20 years to make our money back on that. The life of a windmill before they need some kind or repair or replacement is around 20 years.
bfl
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