Going “green” is not going well. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2010 forecast predicts fossil fuels will “continue to provide most of the energy consumed in the United States…” Only 6 percent of the “energy consumed by 2035 will be replaced by renewable fuel sources.” They will be principally wind and solar, for electricity and home heating, respectively, but with oil as our energy mainstay. Today,
nearly half of voters favor continued deepwater drilling in spite of the oil rig disaster that brought such serious environmental damage to Gulf of Mexico shorelines. “Some 80 percent of voters nationwide support offshore oil drilling…closer to shore,” a June 30 Rasmussen Poll reported.
President Obama’s ideologically-based decision to substitute alternative, green energy for oil is a romantic political choice which America will not see fulfilled for a more than a generation, if ever. But the President’s determination to drive toward other energy sources is seen in his decision to appeal Federal District Court of New Orleans’ ruling against the Administration’s six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf. As columnist Charles Krauthammer noted: “We haven’t run out of easily accessible sources of oil. We’ve been run off them by environmentalists. They prefer to dream green instead.”
Wind power has been hoisted up by Obama Administration wishful thinking as a major alternative power source despite its anemic potential. Take General Electric Company’s plan to build wind turbines on Lake Erie. “Projects like this would never get off the ground if it weren’t for massive tax breaks and government subsidies,” said a Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial blog. “But even then, wind power would be so costly that [the electric power company] wouldn’t touch it if it weren’t for the legal requirement that Ohio utilities buy 12.5 percent of their energy from ‘renewable resources,’ like wind, by 2025. The main argument for wind is that it is ‘green.’ It is not. Because wind blows irregularly, turbines run only about 30 percent of the time…. windpower will make money for companies like General Electric on the backs of taxpayers and ratepayers.”
Government subsidies for windmills and for GE come naturally to Obama. He and GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt are buddies. Immelt is a presidential adviser. His company was likely the beneficiary of billions in green projectsas a major wind turbine maker. Immelt wrote his stockholders in 2009, the Obama Administration will be a profitable “financier” and “key partner.” According to the Washington Examiner in March 4, 2009, an item in Obama’s budget for fiscal 2010 labeled ‘climate revenues’ and totaling $646 billion, inspired confidence in Immelt. On page 115 of Obama’s fiscal 2010 budget a chart showed forecasts, beginning in 2012, of billions of dollars a year in “climate revenues….by forcing companies to pay for the right to emit greenhouse gases (and GE could benefit as possibly the only ‘secondary market trader of the credits). It would all be in the workings of “Cap and Trade” legislation passed by the House June 26, 2009. The legislation would place limits on greenhouse gases and require a massive switch to cleaner energy. The bill appears dead in the Senate. But, like ObamaCare–pronounced dead early this year–it, too, could rise from its political grave, and quite possibly will in a new form.
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