By Alan Caruba
When Mother Nature demonstrates her
extraordinary power, I always hope that people will draw a lesson from it, but
they never seem to. Hurricane Sandy is just the latest example of the futility
and foolishness of thinking that humans can do anything about a hurricane or
similar demonstration of who is really in charge. It is the planet. Not
us.
This suspension of common sense is
worsened when our President goes on television, as he did last Friday on MTV, to
say “I believe the scientists, who say that we are putting too much carbon
emissions into the atmosphere, and it is heating the planet and it is going to
have a severe effect.” This is literally junk science, long since debunked by
legions of scientists who know that carbon dioxide has nothing to do with the
Earth’s temperature. The planet has been in a cooling cycle since
1998.
I keep hoping, too, that lacking the
vital lifeblood of our nation--electricity—millions of people sitting around in
the dark will ask themselves where it comes from, what generates it, how does it
get to their home, and perhaps even why its cost keeps increasing even though
the U.S. sits atop enough coal and natural gas to provide affordable power for
two hundred years at current consumption rates.
According to the U.S. Energy
Information Administration (EIA) in March of this year electricity from coal has
fallen from 50% production to less than 40% by the end of 2011. Other sources
include natural gas at 26%, nuclear at 22%, hydroelectric at 7% and “other” was
said to be 6%. It
should be noted that oil is a transportation fuel and not used to generate
electricity. I believe that the amount that solar and wind produces is more
likely closer to three percent. It is unreliable and uncompetitive and requires
a traditional plant as backup when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun is obscured
by clouds and, of course, at night.
Not
surprisingly, the environmental organizations such as Friends of the Earth and
the Sierra Club are already beating the drums about “climate change”, asserting
“unpredictable, extreme weather.” The planet is always in a state of climate change if
for no other reason that it is subject to the seasons. Blaming extreme weather
on “climate change” is just a code for keeping the “global warming” hoax alive.
The only reason President Obama talks about climate change is his hope that a
carbon tax can be imposed to raise more money for the government to
waste.
Electricity is not magic. Some form of energy must be burned to generate
it and then it must be transmitted by a huge, very old grid to consumers.
In
January of this year, The North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned
that the reliability of the grid was in jeopardy. Thanks to the Obama
administration’s (i.e. EPA) relentless attack on coal, the NERC noted that
beyond the 38 gigawatts of electricity capacity that has already been announced
to retire, it estimated that another 35 to 59 gigawatts will come off-line by
2018 depending on the “scope and timing” of EPA regulations. If you think the
downed lines that Hurricane Sandy will produce are a problem, consider a future
in which the electricity they are supposed to distribute will be significantly
reduced.
What
most Americans don’t know is that coal is the fuel of choice to generate
electricity in many other nations of the world. Just five years ago it produced
fifty percent of our electricity, but today it is less than forty percent, the
lowest share since data began to be collected in 1949. For example, China’s coal consumption grew
9.7% between 2010 and 2011. Last year China consumed 49% of the world’s coal
supply. India’s coal consumption increased 9.2%
While
the President blathers on MTV about CO2 emissions, my friend Dr. Jay Lehr, the
Science Director of The Heartland Institute, dispatches that nonsense noting
that “A simple volcanic eruption will cancel a decade of effort” to reduce
emissions.
“Today,” says Dr. Lehr, “it is our government that is attempting to
thwart our energy independence by blocking nearly every effort to develop our
resources through completely unreasonable restrictions placed on us by the EPA
and the Department of the Interior, and horrible policies of the Department of
Energy which choose to throw unconscionable sums of money at renewable energy
projects…”
Ultimately, while millions of Americans light candles in the dark or
hope their flashlight batteries hold out, we have to ask WHY the Obama
administration has waged a war on the provision of electricity.
This
is a deliberate policy to weaken the nation’s capacity to function at every
level and yet we are days away from an election where millions of Americans will
vote to reelect Obama and send his Democratic Party minions to Congress.
It is
in line with the Obama administration’s deliberate policy of reducing our
military capacity on land, sea and air.
The
only silver lining in the distress and disruption of Hurricane Sandy may be the
awakening of voters to the critical need for more, not less, production of
electricity, for improvements to the national grid, for more oil production for
our transportation needs, and concurrent with this, the hundreds of thousands of
jobs that such efforts would produce and billions it would generate to begin to
reduce the national debt, now in excess of $16 trillion.
Long
ago, the cartoon character, Pogo, famously said, “We have met the enemy and it
is us.”
The
enemy, I would suggest, is President Barack Hussein Obama, his many shadowy,
unaccountable “czars” influencing energy policies, his Cabinet Secretaries of
Energy and the Interior, and the rogue Environmental Protection Agency that is
set to unleash regulations that will destroy the economy, aided and abetted by
the nation’s environmental organizations.
That’s
Hurricane Sandy’s message to America.
© Alan
Caruba, 2012
