Alternate Energy Bullshit
What follows is a updated op-ed piece of mine that was published in the Manchester New Hampshire Union Leader a couple of years ago.
The take-off point for the article was a prior opus by one Carol Shea-Porter (people with hyphenated last names are innately superior to the herd) called "A Common-Sense Plan to Reduce Energy Prices." It is fair to say that both Ms. Shea and Ms. Porter, who share one of New Hampshire’s two seats in the House of Representatives, succeeded in cramming every available cliché and feel-good prevarication that the Green Lobby has been spouting since the sixties into their/her article. (You remember the sixties, don’t you? That’s the decade when America’s idealistic and forward-looking youth invented sex, greened our country, brought nuclear power development to a screeching halt, and got the AIDS epidemic going full blast.)
My article stirred up quite a bit of comment, mostly bitching. My responses to the critics are included under "Rejoinders" below. I call attention to one key point: The major complaint shared by the bitchers was that I offered only criticisms, not solutions.
The fact is there is no solution.
The solutions put forward by the renewable-energy crowd run the gamut from bald-faced lies to asinine bullshit.
When the world runs out of oil, coal, and natural gas ─ and it will ─ the framework of civilization as we know it will collapse, not all at once, but gradually, over a period of decades, perhaps a century or two. The earth cannot sustain a population of six or ten or 20 billion humans without fossil fuel for fertilizers, transportation, medical research, construction machinery, road maintenance, shipping, urban infrastructure, mining, shopping malls, skyscrapers, soccer stadiums, iPhones. lawnmowers, Walmarts. The result? A new, more permanent Dark Ages.
But, hey, there's a silver lining. We’ll all be dead by then and probably our kids and their kids too, so who gives a shit, right?
If you have any comments, pro or con, I’d love to hear them.
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My Op-Ed Article
Anyone, any politician, who claims as Shea-Porter does, that the solution to our energy problems lies to any significant degree in the development of renewable energy sources is either a fool or a liar.
All renewable energy schemes, all, are based on energy from the sun, either directly ─ solar heating, solar electric — or indirectly ─ hydro, wind, wood, ethanol, trash. organic waste, etc. (For Ms. Shea-Porter’s benefit, natural gas is not a renewable resource and energy-efficient vehicles aren’t a resource at all unless you think they grow on trees in Japan.)
Water: We have already harnessed most of the world’s available hydro power (with a massive attendant toll on wildlife).
Wind: Wind farms can contribute only a tiny fraction of the nation’s electric needs and that at the cost of major environmental damage. Moreover, the energy required to develop, manufacture, install, and maintain these monstrosities is dependant on that ol’ devil fossil fuel.
Ethanol: Ethanol is not only inefficient (it uses more energy to produce than it provides), but escalates food prices, requires petro-chemicals in its production, and contributes to the degradation of the environment.
Wood: Wood is useful for heating and cooking. It has been since the Lower Paleolithic. But wood stoves pollute the atmosphere. Moreover, wood is a limited resource (it takes 10 acres of New Hampshire woodland to produce enough firewood on a sustainable basis to heat a three-bedroom house). If you don’t believe that wood is a limited resource, just look at an ecological map of Asia or Africa where vast areas of these continents have been turned into desert by mankind’s rape of the primeval forests.
Solar: Solar energy for heating or generating electricity is the holy grail of the alternate-energy crowd. Its acolytes often salt their sermons with dark hints of greedy oil barons thwarting their righteous cause. They don’t mention that manufacturing solar cells is prohibitively expensive in terms of money, resources, and fossil fuel. Solar-electric is a technology that for the foreseeable future is useful only in extreme contexts ─ outer space, the Antarctic, rain-forest Eco-resorts in Belize. Nor do they mention that solar heating suffers from similar flaws plus one other — it is most available where it is least needed. India, Miami Beach, the Mojave Desert, Baja California, and equatorial Africa get plenty of nice, fat sunlight, but try keeping your family warm with solar during the heart of a New England winter.
Geothermal: I know it’s a quixotic battle, but geothermal energy is not the same as heat pumping no matter what the New York Times says. True geothermal is pie-in-the-sky nonsense that might have some applicability if ones house is located on the slopes of Mauna Loa or atop the San Andreas fault or in the neighborhood of Old Faithful, but has no potential if one dwells in Hooksett or Manchester or even the more liberal sections of Massachusetts.
Et cetera: As for waste conversion, methane digesters, and other pipe dreams ─ puleeze...give me a break. Remember Masterblaster in the film Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome? Well, don’t consider it to be a documentary on how to produce gasoline from hog shit.
There are, of course, significant ways to save energy. Many ─ home insulation, smaller automobiles, mass transport ─ were obvious to us stupid masses even without Shea-Porter to lead us to the promised land. Other, less palatable, but realistic solutions ─ population control, the reversal of suburban sprawl, and drastic changes in our lifestyles ─ are never broached by the elite of liberal thought...lest they cost these devout folk some votes at election time.
What should be understood, and probably won’t be, is that dependence on foreign oil will not be alleviated by political posturing, scape-goating, or demonizing British Petroleum. We should bear in mind, and probably won’t, that all resources, not just oil, are finite ─ with a single exception, that being hot air from politicians running for office.
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My Rejoinders
Glad to see my opinion column (it’s not an editorial, Gary I. Kerr of Chichester) raised so many hackles. That’s what opinion pieces are for. Since there are so many pejoratives to deal with, I’ll take a scattershot approach to answering a few.
1. Jason of Londonderry and a lot of others seem disturbed that I didn’t offer solutions. My piece was not about solutions, it was about politicians peddling phony solutions. And by the way (I know this is a terrible, terrible thing to say), what makes everybody so certain there is a solution?
2. Dave M. of Sandwich says he’s living off the grid {at least in the summer). Dave ─ this may come as a shock to you ─ but New York City is not going to be able to live off the grid, 100,000,000 cars are not going to be powered off the grid, the world’s airlines are not going to fly to Hong Kong and London and Rio and Miami and Melbourne off the grid, our military is not going to fight wars off the grid. That’s great you say? I’m not so sure I don’t agree with you. But let’s not talk about keeping the status quo with quasi magical sources of energy.
3. Art from Portsmouth accuses me of being an editor, not a writer. I am hurt, Arthur, deeply, deeply hurt.
4. Jeff Anderson from Weare, clearly a top flight nuclear physicist, says that Hydrogen plus Oxygen produces energy according to Einstein’s e = mc2 formula. Jeez, and here I thought the atomic bomb was based on the conversion of mass into energy. Good to know it was just drinking water being produced at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not that nasty radioactivity.
5. Somebody with the moniker www.northeastgeo.com/ complains that heat pumping is the same as geothermal. It isn’t. My son in Kentucky has a home with a heat pump. There are lots of homes with heat pumps even in Peterborough. Heat pumps are energy efficient, but they have nothing to do with renewable energy or with geothermal, which is a scheme for tapping volcanic heat deep within the crust of the earth.
6. William of Deerfield is angry about many things ─ second-hand smoke, mercury in fish, war, CEOs, poverty, Arabs, conservatives, bad air. I don’t like most of these either, particularly second-hand smoke and CEOs (I did work at the Reader’s Digest for 21 years after all). On the other hand I’m having a bit of a problem figuring out what William’s shopping list has to do with renewable energy. Oh well, I guess I’m just an old neocon mired in old thinking.
To everybody, pro or con, rational or irrational: I do not advocate or condemn drilling. I am not in favor of or against nuclear energy. I am for conservation. I am for preservation of the wilderness (and against wind farms). And I am unalterably opposed to politicians of the Shea-Porter breed feeding sugar-coated pap to whatever undecided voters remain in these contentious times.
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
Categories: Lies, Green Lobbyists
Tags: gloom and doom Shea-Porter
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