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Brownouts and Blackouts:
Power Crisis in California
By Alan Caruba
There's a good reason why
Clinton administration officials like Energy Secretary Bill Richardson are
wringing their hands over the prospect of brownouts and blackouts as
demands for more electrical power increase along with the wider use of
things like computers. The crisis affecting California could
and should have been averted.
As recently as July 21st, Secretary Richardson was
urging the development of "alternative energy sources such as
biofuels and wind power" according to a UPI news article. Like Gore,
Richardson was spouting the need to secure "a meaningful decline in
our future reliance on fossil fuels …"
This is outrageous nonsense. There are enough known reserves of oil, gas,
and coal to last well into the next century. Make that centuries if we can
just get at the reserves we know
exist and that doesn't include those yet to be discovered. His apparent
solution to a very serious problem is to build hundreds of thousands of
windmills. He actually wants at least "five percent of the nation's
energy to be produced by wind power."
According to Frederick D. Palmer,
president of the Greening Earth Society and chief
executive officer of Western Fuels Association, "it is incredible
that the Clinton administration has just now noticed-after seven-plus
years in office-that we have an electricity shortage." Part of the
problem is Vice President Gore's fixation on carbon dioxide emissions
"as the sole criteria for energy policy in the United States."
As a result, the Clinton-Gore administration has done nothing to respond
to the rising need for electrical power because it is generated, in large
part by coal. So the White House liars
have been telling everyone it's the utility's fault for not building more
capacity at the same time the Environmental Protection Agency is suing
major utilities for not installing millions of dollars of more apparatus
to further "clean" their
emissions.
As Palmer points out, "The problem
of electricity supply, at base, is that we are using up the capacity in
existing power plants, including those that are coal-fired." This
nation has to begin building new power plants. Lots of them. It hasn't
because those who run the nation's utilities, when not being sued by the
EPA, are reluctant to commit millions knowing the government will harass
them every step of the way. If Al Gore is elected no new plants will be
built and that is why you better start thinking about installing your own
generator in the basement.
In his book, Earth in the Balance, Gore
wrote that "higher taxes on fossil fuels" were "one of the
logical first steps in changing our policies in a matter consistent with a
more responsible approach to the environment." My friend, Dr. S. Fred
Singer, points out that "Gore isn't as excited as he used to be about
this." A Houston Chronicle article quotes him as saying he no longer
supports this. "This isn't just a flip-flop from 1992; it's a
flip-flop from earlier this year when Gore proudly claimed to stand by
everything in his book," notes Dr.
Singer. Now Gore is going around saying "I have made it clear in this
campaign that I am not calling for any tax increase on gasoline, on oil,
on natural gas, or anything else." And some people want to vote for
this contemptible liar and hypocrite.
The Greens hate the notion that people
are using power for just about any reason. It "pollutes"
according to their warped ideology. The Pew Research Center for People and
the Press says 79% of Americans have cable or satellite television; 59%
have home computers; 16% have DVD players. Add in all the rest who have
radios, refrigerators, electric can openers, lights and other useful
devices, and you have a totally wired American utterly dependent on
electricity.
In April of this year, the Western Fuels
Association filed suit in Wyoming federal district court against the
Turning Point Project, Friends of the Earth,
Earth Island Institute, Ozone Action, Rainforest Action Network, and the
International Center for Technology Assessment, charging them with
"commercial defamation" under Section 43 of the Lanham Act (15
U.S.C. ~1125). The Association says its advocacy and coal supply business
are both damaged the Turning Point Project's publication of a full-page
advertisement in The New York Times and materials on its website that
advocates the elimination of coal use in electricity generation!
On December 13, 1999, an ad estimated to
have cost $97,000 pictured a mosquito under the headline "Global
Warming-how will it end?" Western Fuels Association's complaint is
that the ad makes false and misleading factual representations regarding
the effects of carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels,
specifically coal, and an alleged human-induced overheating
of the earth's atmosphere. Remember, too, that President Clinton, using
the Antiquities Act, has put one of this nation's richest, untapped
supplies of high-grade coal off limits to
use when he created the Escalante Staircase National Park in Utah.
At some point, this case will go to trial
and then the defendants will have to conclusively prove that there is any
global warming. They will have to prove that coal-based generation of
electricity is a danger to the environment.
What are the odds of that? Zero! Then maybe this cabal of radical Green
organizations will experience a blackout of their own?
Alan Caruba, a veteran science and
business writer is a consultant to the American Policy Center, as well as
founder of The National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information
about scare campaigns (www.anxietycenter.com).
This is an excerpt from his weekly commentary, Warning Signs.
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