THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XI, Issue # 161, July 23, 2009
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
FORESTS OF CONCRETE & STEEL:
Many Words Could Describe Wind Energy & Green Jobs.
"Sustainable" Is Not One of Them.
By Paul K. Driessen
RENEWABLE ENERGY -- PROPAGANDA VERSUS REALITY: ENVIRONMENTALIST & LIBERAL LEFTIST POLITICAL
PROPAGANDA EXTOLLING THE SUPPOSED VIRTUES OF WIND ENERGY, AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR COAL. OIL, & NATURAL GAS IN
GENERATING THE ELECTRICITY THAT POWERS MUCH OF OF AMERICA -- THE REALITIES BEING IGNORED BY THE WIND
ENERGY PROPAGANDISTS: (1) ACTUAL EXPERIENCE WITH WIND-BASED POWER SYSTEMS HAS BEEN EXPENSIVE,
JOB-KILLING, & DISAPPOINTING. (2) MOVING TO WIND POWER WOULD RESULT IN OUR LANDSCAPES BEING
BLANKETED WITH FORESTS OF CONCRETE & STEEL.
FULL STORY:
Boone Pickens, Nacel Energy, Vestas Iberia, and others have been issuing statements and running ads, extolling the
virtues of wind as an affordable, sustainable energy resource. Renewable energy reality is slowly taking hold,
however.
Spain did increase its installed wind power capacity to 10% of its total electricity, although actual energy output is
10-30% of this, or 1-3% of total electricity, because the wind is intermittent and unreliable. However, Spain spent $3.7
billion on the program in 2007 alone, King Juan Carlos University Economics Professor Gabriel Calzada determined.
It created 50,000 jobs, mostly installing wind turbines, at $73,000 in annual subsidies per job – and 10,000 of these
jobs have already been terminated. The subsidies have been slashed, due to Spain’s growing economic problems,
putting the remaining 40,000 jobs at risk.
Meanwhile, the cost of subsidized wind energy and carbon dioxide emission permits sent electricity prices soaring for
other businesses – causing 2.2 jobs to be lost for every “green” job created, says Calzada. Spain’s unemployment
rate is now 17% and rising. That’s hardly the “success” story so often cited by the U.S. Congress and the Obama
administration.
Across the Channel, Britain’s biggest wind-energy projects are in trouble. Just as the United Kingdom government
announced its goal of creating 400,000 eco-jobs by 2015, major green energy employer, Vestas UK, is ending
production. All 7,000 turbines that Downing Street just committed to installing over the next decade will be
manufactured – not in Britain, but in Germany, Denmark, and China.
For businesses, existing global warming policies have added 21% to industrial electricity bills since 2001, and this will
rise to 55% by 2020, the UK government admits. Its latest renewable energy strategy will add another 15% – meaning
the total impact on British industry will likely be a prohibitive 70% cost increase over two decades. This is the result
of the government’s plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions 34% below 1990 levels by 2020, and increase the share of
renewables, especially wind, from 6% to 31% of Britain’s electricity.
These cost hikes could make British manufacturers uncompetitive, and send thousands more jobs overseas, the
Energy Intensive Users Group reports. English steel mills could become “unable to compete globally, even at current
domestic energy prices,” says British journalist Dominic Lawson; “but deliberately to make them uncompetitive is
industrial vandalism – and even madness … a futile gesture ... and immoral.”
On this side of the pond, President Obama and anti-hydrocarbon members of Congress are promoting “green” energy
and jobs, via new mandates, standards, tax breaks, and subsidies. However, the United States would need 180,000
1.5-megawatt wind turbines by 2020, just to generate the 600 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity that compliance with
the narrowly passed Waxman-Markey global warming bill would necessitate, retired Energy and Nuclear Engineering
Professor James Rust calculates.
This would require millions of acres of scenic, habitat and agricultural lands, and 126 million tons of concrete, steel,
fiberglass and “rare earth” minerals for the turbines, at 700 tons per turbine; prodigious quantities of concrete, steel,
copper, and land for new transmission lines; and still more land, fuel, and raw materials for backup gas-fired
generators. America’s new national forests will apparently be made of concrete and steel.
Those miners and drillers would likely be reclassified as “green” workers, based on the intended purpose of their
output. However, the raw materials will probably not be produced in the U.S.A., because so many lands, prospects,
and deposits are off limits – and NIMBY litigation will further hamper resource extraction.
Air quality laws and skyrocketing energy costs (due to carbon taxes and expensive renewable energy mandates) will
make wind turbine (and solar panel) manufacturing in the USA equally improbable. Thus, manufacturing could well be
in China or India, and most “green” jobs could be for installers, as Spain and Britain discovered.
Posturing has already collided with reality in Texas, the nation’s wind energy capital. Austin’s GreenChoice program
cannot find buyers for electricity generated entirely from wind and solar power. Its latest sales scheme has been a
massive flop: after seven months, 99% of its recent electricity offering remains unsold.
Austin officials admit that “times have changed,” and the recession and falling energy prices may make it impossible
for the city to meet its lofty goals. The company’s renewable electricity now costs almost three times more than
standard electricity, and even eco-conscious consumers care more about the color of their money than the hue of
their purported ideology.
Even worse for global warming alarmists and renewable energy advocates and rent seekers, global warming patterns
have reversed during the past decade. Satellite data reveal that the planet is cooling, despite steadily rising carbon
dioxide levels, and Summertime low temperature records are being broken all over the United States.
“You'd better hope global warming is caused by manmade CO2 if you're investing in [renewable] sectors,” says
Daniel Rice, the past decade’s best-performing U.S. equity fund manager (BlackRock Energy and Resources Fund).
But evidence for manmade catastrophic global warming is dissipating faster than carbon dioxide from an open soda
bottle on a hot Summer day.
The crucial fact remains: wind and solar are simply not economical without major government subsidies or monstrous
carbon taxes. Moreover, cap-and-tax legislation currently being promoted in the U.S. House of Representatives and
the U.S. Senate is “not enough to do anything” about supposed global warming disasters, notes Rice.
“All it does is provide Obama a pass to Copenhagen,” where the United Nations will host a climate change
conference in December, 2009, Rice says. And those subsidies and taxes would drive energy prices still higher,
killing jobs, and skyrocketing the cost of everything we eat, drive, heat, cool, grow, make, and do.
Congress and the Obama administration are dragging their feet on nuclear power, closing off access to more
resource-rich lands, and imposing layers of new regulations on oil, gas, and coal energy – denying Americans these
vast stores of energy and hundreds of billions in revenue that developing them would generate. Meanwhile, slick
wind turbine ad campaigns promote expensive, heavily subsidized, unreliable technologies that only climate activists
and company lobbyists would describe as sustainable, affordable, eco-friendly, or socially responsible.
The ads and lobbyists seek more mandates, tax breaks, and subsidies. Wind promoters want to quiet opponents long
enough to get energy and climate legislation enacted – before Americans realize how it would drive the price of energy
still higher, kill jobs, curtail living standards and liberties, and raise the cost of everything we eat, drive, heat, cool,
grow, make, and do.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Political Environmentalism Versus Human Progress & Prosperity:
Policy Issues Relating to Energy, Environment,
& Natural Resources
The Earth's Natural History, Global Climate Changes,
& the Future of Human Life & Civilization on the Planet:
Science, Ideology, & Public Policy
Political Economy -- Philosophies, Systems, & Public Policies:
Government, the Economy, & Economic Prosperity
Paul K. Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and for the Congress of
Racial Equality. He is author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power • Black Death.
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Conservative & Free-Market Analysis of Government, Politics & Public Policy, Covering Political, Legal, Constitutional, Economic,
Cultural, Military, International, Strategic, & Geopolitical Issues
Conservative Government Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity