California Conservative

The Orlando Sentinel’s Peter Brown is a columnist that I’ve disagreed with from time to time, but he’s written a great editorial about the environmentalists’ unrealistic demands in terms of increasing our energy-producing infrastructure. Here’s a couple stinging salvos from his column:

In this era of seemingly permanent higher energy prices, environmentalists’ blanket anti-fossil fuel, anti-nuclear power dogma must go. Unfortunately, we can’t meet our energy needs by just driving more fuel-efficient cars or putting up solar panels & windmills, although all are good ideas. We must geographically diversify our energy industry, which means more offshore drilling & putting refineries in someone’s backyard.
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Nuclear now produces 20 percent of U.S. electricity, but that figure will fall to 15 percent by 2020 as old plants go offline. At most, even environmentalists see biomass, geothermal, wind & solar energy as providing only 10 percent of our energy needs by then & that’s a wildly optimistic view. When combined with the 15 percent from nuclear plants in place, that would still mean 75 percent of U.S. energy needs would be met by fossil fuels.

With China and India relying more & more on oil, it’s obvious that we can’t rely as much on foreign oil and that we’ll need more viable supplies of fossil fuels, supplemented by alternative energy sources. Alternative energy sources will be just that for the near- and mid-term future. There can’t produce enough energy to power American industry. Not even close.

Following the environmental extremists’ policies would severely hamper America’s economy and it isn’t debateable. Stifling production is unacceptable and we all know it.

In the past, pollsters have asked people if they’re against offshore drilling for oil or natural gas or for drilling in ANWR and solid majorities opposed these policies. But that was before Katrina and before paying higher prices at the pumps. Feeling pain in the pocketbook changes minds.

I wonder how those polls will read next spring after natural gas prices have increased, as some energy experts have predicted, by 50-70%. I suspect that people in the so-called Rust Belt states will be hopping mad at the environmental extremists’ blocking of drilling offshore and in ANWR.

In a way, this could play strongly into the Republicans’ hands in the ‘06 elections, since Democrats are the party identified with these environmental extremist policies.

Do you think that people will care more about the liberal judges who essentially eliminated private property rights or the environmental extremists whose policies caused their home heating bills to jump — and, thereby, will they be less concerned about the so-called ‘Culture of Corruption’ within the GOP?

If I were a GOP consultant, I’d tie those issues to every Democrat who isn’t a multi-term incumbent running for office in the U.S. Senate.

The anti-nuclear hysteria that followed Three Mile Island failed to acknowledge the fact that the safety system worked. And in the years since, the safety of nuclear plants has improved dramatically. How do we know? Because other countries, even France, whose politics one might assume leads them to be much more risk averse than we, have continued building nuclear power plants. In fact, not only do the French get most of their power from them, they’re building a new one to sell electricity to their neighbors.

France is hardly considered a major contributor to creating greenhouse gases. In fact, they’ve got a pretty good environmental record. Does this matter to the anti-nuclear hysterics in the U.S.? Of course not. Facts don’t mean anything to them. They act as if they’d be perceived as hypocrites if they change policy to fit current technologies.

More & more mainstream environmentalists are talking about the viability of nuclear power because they see that nuclear power produces few greenhouse gases while strengthening our energy infrastructure. You’d think that that was a good thing but it isn’t to the environmental extremists.

It’s time for Americans everywhere to end the environmental extremists’ ability to use the court system to stand in the way of our energy independance.

If we don’t, we’ll all be left out in the cold.

Cross-posted at Boxer Watch

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 1st, 2005 at 8:46 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Domestic Policies, Environment, RNC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.