But that’s not all. According to Dr. Klaus Kaiser, Central
Europe experienced a Mother Nature event – a total solar eclipse around 9 a.m.,
March 20, 2015, the spring equinox, and
a super-moon. It will be interesting to see how electric power plants dependent
heavily on solar power fared in a shut-down during the day when energy demand
is at its peak. And the most vulnerable was Germany which derives a larger percent
of its electricity needs from solar power. http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/70574
Dr. Kaiser said, “With
well over 10,000 wind turbines in operation, the European electric grid has
already experienced instability close to collapse. The (far) offshore
system Bard-1 in the German Bight, built for approximately $5 billion two years
ago is slowly rusting in the sea. It is a real money maker—for the legal
profession.”
Dominion Virginia Power has offered customers in their
monthly billing the whimsical “Green Power,” to reduce the family’s carbon
footprint in 2015, a “voluntary option that enables customers to match their
electricity use with clean, renewable energy from wind (78%), solar (1%), and
biomass (21%).” Dominion offers two choices:
-
100% Option,
matching 100 percent of a customer’s electricity use with Renewable Energy
Certificates (RECs), at a cost of 1.3 cents per kWh.
-
Block
Option, purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) in fixed monthly increments;
each $2 supports 154 kWh of renewable energy.
Such voluntary options are nothing more than customers
subsidizing unnecessarily expensive energy generation that is not really clean,
it is the industry’s “dirty little secret,” as someone called it years ago.
Having researched the wind and solar power generation
extensively, and having written a bestseller and numerous articles on the
topic, I know that renewable energy is neither cheap, nor clean, nor
victimless. There are millions of animal casualties, chopped birds by wind turbines
and fried birds by solar panels’ heat flux; animals experience bizarre behavior,
fertility issues, and spontaneous abortion of fetuses when living in close
proximity to wind farms; humans experience serious health effects as well when
in close proximity to wind turbines and from their home smart meters attached
to the smart grid.
One of the more interesting presentations I heard at CPAC
2015 was the panel on “Climate: What Tom Steyer Won’t Tell You.”
Representative Bill Flores (TX-17) addressed the global
warming alarmism, pointing out that this administration has done everything in
its power to stop domestic energy production in this country, spending billions
of dollars for bankrupt solar energy producers like Solyndra. He enumerated the
six “inconvenient truths” of those promoting the climate agenda:
1.
It kills U.S. jobs.
2.
It costs trillions of dollars.
3.
It’s based on junk science.
4.
It uses fantasy technology that is yet to be
developed.
5.
It manipulates cost/benefit analysis by using
junk economics.
6.
It fails the smell test.
Rep. Flores stated that Obama’s energy agenda, via EPA’s tightening
regulations such as ozone levels and Waters
of the U.S., kills 3 million American jobs, exporting them to China and
India, and importing their pollution back to the United States. “By 2020, the
EPA’s ozone regulations will eliminate $3.5 trillion of economic output.” There
is no credible evidence that ozone levels cause increased health issues for Americans
but poverty does, Rep. Flores added. Because the EPA knows that California
cannot meet its stringent ozone standards, then California is excluded from the
equation.
It is EPA regulatory malpractice, said Rep. Flores, as
evidenced by the attempt to change the definition of water in the Waters of the U.S. from “navigable
waters” to any puddle of rain that falls in a farmer’s field.
Tom Steyer, a “green” energy devotee, has pledged $100
million in 2014 to Democrats who oppose the Keystone pipeline and favor the
disuse of fossil fuels over renewables.
Steyer opposes coal in an attempt to boost the value of his solar
projects. According to John Hinderaker, “Steyer
owes his fortune in large part to the fact that he has been one of the world’s
largest financiers of coal projects.” http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/04/the-epic-hypocrisy-of-tom-steyer.php
Myron Ebell, Director of the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, jocularly introduced as the “enemy number one to the climate change
agenda,” talked about the environmental noose that was put around the world’s
global economy in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro and the decades since then that
tightened that noose. Obama took control of the economy through ever more
stringent environmental regulations even though there has been no global
warming in the last 18 years.
Pointing out that the entire global warming fiasco is based
on faulty IPCC computer modeling, Ebell said, “Do you trust the models or the actual
data?” Ninety-seven percent of climate change scientists say, trust us, we have
the models. “If the models and the data don’t agree, change the data.” The
deception was exacerbated by the infamous hockey stick graph, Ebell added. Every agency of the federal government views
global warming as the greatest national security threat. John Kerry, our Secretary of State, said in a
speech that climate change is his number one priority.
Gary Broadbent, representing Murray Energy Corporation, the
largest privately held coal mine in the U.S., highlighted Obama’s “war on coal”
via regulations passed by EPA alone in the last five years totaling 25,000
pages. Quoting Robert E. Murray,
Chairman of Murray Energy Corporation, Broadband said, “Prior to the election
of President Obama, coal provided 52% of the electricity generation in our
country. Today it is 37%. In our judgement, it will further decline to about 30%,
at a maximum.”
Enumerating the 411 power plants designated for closure
through 2016, “101,000 megawatts of the lowest cost electricity in America,” CEO
Murray wrote that electricity, generated by coal at the plant cost of 4 cents
per kWh, will be replaced by “Mr. Obama and his appointees” with 15 cent per
kWh electricity from natural gas and 22 cent per kWh electricity from wind and
solar power, not to mention the huge subsidies to solar power from American
taxpayers.
In CEO Murray’s opinion, the Obama Administration has
bypassed illegally Congress, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the
States and their Public Utility Commissions, which are “empowered to regulate
the availability and cost of electricity.”
According to Chairman Murray, while we came within 700 megawatts
of reducing loads to 61 million Americans in 13 states during the Polar Vortex
of 2014, “China has been building a new 500 megawatt coal-fired plant every
week for years, [and] burned about 4.0 billion tons of coal last year.”
CEO Robert E. Murray offered multiple examples that “the
global ‘climate change’ scare is purely political and not based on any science:
-
According to NASA satellites and ground-based
temperature measurements, the earth has not warmed for the last eighteen years
and five months. But CO2 levels have risen almost ten percent since 1997.
-
Seventy percent of the years since the Ice Age
were warmer than today.
-
There has been a decline in the world land area
under drought in the past thirty years.
-
Rates of sea-level rise remain infinitesimal,
averaging only about one millimeter per year as measured by tide gauges.
-
Satellites show that a greater area of Antarctic
sea ice exists now than any time since space-based measurements began in 1979.
-
2012 and 2013 IPCC reports concluded that there
has been no significant increase in either the frequency or intensity of
extreme weather events in the modern era.
-
The past year was not the warmest on record, as
Mr. Obama claimed during his State of the Union address, which I attended, on
January 20.”
On this sunless first day of spring, with cold temperatures,
rain, sleet, and snow in the northeast, we should be thankful to the cold
industry for producing enough energy to keep us warm and our large economy
running smoothly. There is no secret that the environmental NGOs such the
Sierra Club, Natural Resource Defense Council, and rich individuals promoting “Beyond
Coal,” are influencing EPA’s overregulation of the manufacturing sector under
the guise of saving the planet, to the detriment of our economy, and destroying
wealth and the middle class in the process. The war on coal is real and so is the
war on our free market-based way of life.
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