JMHO Loc: Utah

Neither the science, the cost, nor the recent history of “renewable energy” provides a single good reason to force Americans to pay for this “green” failure.

Imagine you wanted to get in your electric car and drive a considerable distance. It wouldn’t take long for your car to run out of power, so you would have to have another car, one using gasoline, to drive behind you to make sure you reached your destination.

That’s a description of “renewable energy”, wind and solar, in America today because they both require backup from traditional energy sources such as coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear. And “renewable energy” based on “free” sun and wind power costs more to produce and purchase. Need it be said that the sun does not always shine consistently everywhere or at night and that the wind does not always blow?

Within twenty-four hours of one another I received a news release from the Governor’s Wind Energy Coalition celebrating the e******n of a new chairman and vice chairman, and read a CNN news article saying that “The White House wants to put more returning servicemen and women to work manufacturing and installing solar panels” as part of “his growing list of climate actions meant to combat g****l w*****g.”

That list was a twelve-page long, single-spaced White House fact sheet. The White House seems to think that the states can do something about “c*****e c****e”, but the climate is measured in decades and centuries, not whether it is going to rain next Monday which is something we call “the weather.” And just as you can do nothing about the rain, neither can you do anything to affect the climate decades from now.

The White House has a problem. There is no “g****l w*****g.” Even if you change the name to “c*****e c****e”, the Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle for the last eighteen years.

For the past 5,000 years humans have, as often as not, “done something” about the climate by moving somewhere else it was less of a bother and threat or found ways to adapt. Other than prayer, there was and is nothing humans can do about Mother Nature.

Most surely, getting veterans to manufacture solar panels is about as lame and stupid an idea as the President has proposed in the last 24 hours. Does the name “Solyndra” ring a bell? It was one of several solar farms that, along with wind farms went belly-up, leaving investors and consumers with nothing but the sunlight and passing breezes.

Indeed, the best news of late has been that the U.S. Senate has rejected a proposal to extend the federal wind Production Tax Credit (PCT) for another five years. The wind producers have benefitted from it for three decades. The federal subsidy to wind-energy producers expired along with other tax breaks at the end of 2013, but was retroactively extended through 2014 as part of the Cromnibus budget bill passed last December.

The PCT was intended to provide what was a then-new energy industry a helping hand, but it kept being extended and the industry benefitted as well from renewable energy mandates (REM) in 29 states and the District of Columbia. They require that a specific amount of electricity be purchased from renewable energy, wind or solar, producers. All that managed to do was drive up the cost of electricity to consumers. This is what happens when politicians get involved.

That’s a good reason to wonder why there is a Governors Wind Power Coalition in the first place. It consists of 23 Democratic and Republican governors from every region of the nation “working together to develop the nation’s wind energy resources”, but the nation doesn’t need wind energy which produces an unpredictable amount as opposed to traditional resources such as coal.

At the same time the President is talking about solar and wind power, his administration is pursuing a relentless “war” on coal that is forcing the primary source of electricity in America, coal-fired plants, to shut down. If that doesn’t sound like treason, then consider too that the U.S. is the greatest producer of oil and natural gas in the world and we have at least two century’s worth of known coal reserves. We have absolutely no need for wind or solar energy.

When Obama gave his State of the Union speech in 2014, solar power represented a pathetic 0.2 percent of the U.S. electricity supply according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. According to the Energy Research Institute, in 2013 wind power provided 1.6% of all the energy consumed in the U.S.

There isn’t a single good reason for either wind or solar power in an energy powerhouse like the United States. They are both costly, unpredictable, and a threat to a number of animal species. Neither the science, the cost, nor the recent history of “renewable energy” provides a single good reason to force Americans to pay for this “green” failure.

CFP

solarkin

Every word from his face is a lie.
He had an agenda that disregards America.
He should be relieved of duty Upon
The merits of the 25th ammendment.

DamnYANKEE

My question is , what DONT he Lie about !!! ???

DamnYANKEE

His Agenda was, IS to DESTROY America,,, PERIOD :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil:

permafrost Loc: Minnesota

JMHO,

This anti-renewables problem you and others have is one of the worst topics ever posted on the forum.. Time to start facing facts and stop helping the Koch brothers.. For starters...

These paragraphs are a small part of a long artical in a business magazine I read on an airplane a few days ago.
It is rather long, but was very interesting. Particularly the role insurance companies are beginning to take on the climate problems..

Note this is an issue that the money men are now addressing, that is how will they keep money flowing to themselves. As you will see if you read even this part of it, they are now starting to look away from f****l f**ls as the sure thing money maker..

When the money men change course, you can be sure the new solution will indeed be a major factor..

Hope you will read a bit of my post... Thank you...

The first trend is rising problems for the f****l f**l sector, which can be seen on at least three fronts: (a) financial and (b) physical/technological, which are tightly intertwined, and (c) political, where pre-existing problems, both climate-related and otherwise, come to the fore as f****l f**ls lose their position of dominance. These problems are most severe for coal, the dirtiest and most deadly of the f****l f**ls.

As noted recently in the Economist, whole countries are turning against coal, and “producers face prolonged weakness in prices.” More specifically, “The Dow Jones Total Coal Market index has fallen by 76% in the past five years.” It went on say:

High-cost deep mines in the rich world are worst-hit: in America 24 coal companies have gone bust in the past three years, and one-sixth of the remaining capacity loses money. But even Australia, whose low-cost opencast mines play a role akin to Saudi Arabia’s in the oil market, is jittery.

Coal’s problems aren’t just limited to the U.S., so there’s simply no way to spin this as “Obama’s war on coal,” as Republicans are wont to do. This a global problem for a global industry that’s at the heart of causing global probllems for everyone else.

Coal’s problems aren’t just limited to the U.S., so there’s simply no way to spin this as “Obama’s war on coal,” as Republicans are wont to do. This a global problem for a global industry that’s at the heart of causing global probllems for everyone else.

To be more specific: A look at the situation in China—the world’s biggest coal consumer—found multiple indications of declining demand, and increasing pressure to continue cutting back. Meanwhile, in the U.S., “coal now struggles to compete with natural gas, which has fallen by 80% in price since 2008,” while European consumption—which soared after Germany decided to close its nuclear-power plants—is now being eroded by gas and renewables. Worldwide, “two-thirds of coal-fired power plants proposed worldwide since 2010 have been stalled or cancelled,” according to a report from Coalswarm, an environmental think-tank, the Economist‘s story continues, “In 2014 the world added more generation from windpower than coal. Overall, Europe and America have already cut coal-fired generation capacity by over a fifth in a decade. The output of American coal mines dropped to 1993 levels in 2013.” The only remaining global bright spot for the coal industry is India, where consumption isn’t projected to peak until the 2030s. But China’s recent history tends to cast even that in doubt.

Political pressure is another big concern. “Overall, coal k**ls around 800,000 people a year, most of them poor,” the story notes, adding that “Campaigners reckon 80% of the world’s coal reserves must stay in the ground if the planet is to stand a chance of keeping g****l w*****g under 2ºC by 2050.” It then cites the beginnings of a regulatory squeeze in Germany and America, along with the divestment movement, which it notes “is under way in many universities,” before adding, “The World Bank no longer invests in coal-fired plants. Last year Norway’s sovereign-wealth fund dumped its holdings in more than 50 coal companies worldwide.”
a decade ago, Big Oil faced a world of declining proven reserves, rapid growth in China, India and elsewhere, and growing pressure for alternatives based on concerns over g****l w*****g. Their response was a profit-maximizing strategy based on going after hard-to-reach, more expensive reserves (which Klare himself dubbed “tough oil”). The strategy worked wonderfully, as long as the price of oil remained high. “This meant that no f****l f**l reserves, no potential source of supply—no matter how remote or hard to reach, how far offshore or deeply buried, how encased in rock—was deemed untouchable in the mad scramble to increase output and profits.” This is what lead to deepwater drilling, of the kind that BP Deepwater Horizon blow-out made infamous, as well as Canadian tar sands, and Artic oil fields. But as the price plummeted, “the very strategy that had generated record-breaking profits has suddenly become hopelessly dysfunctional.” As Klare explains:

The production-maximizing strategy crafted by O’Reilly and his fellow CEOs rested on three fundamental assumptions: that, year after year, demand would keep climbing; that such rising demand would ensure prices high enough to justify costly investments in unconventional oil; and that concern over c*****e c****e would in no significant way alter the equation. Today, none of these assumptions holds true.

In sharp contrast to the problems facing the f****l f**l industry, most renewables face an increasingly bright future. Moreover, the future is a lot closer at hand than most people realize. Key to understanding what’s afoot is the concept of “grid parity,” the cost point at which renewables can generate power at least as cheaply as buying power from the electric grid.

In Janaury 2014, German investment bank Deutsche Bank’s 2014 Outlook report for the solar industry reported that “Solar is currently competitive without subsidies in at least 19 markets globally and we expect more markets to reach grid parity in 2014 as system prices decline further.” These were mostly country-level markets in a given sector, such as “Germany, Residential,” Germany, Industrial” and “Mexico, Commercial,” but also included “California, Residential.”

Wind power is also advancing rapidly as an option. On a worldwide basis, “onshore wind-generation costs are competitive with those of the fossil-fuel sources,” while in Denmark, where wind is particularly advantageous, wind power could soon be half the cost of f****l f**ls.

The smart money is no longer bound up in f****l f**ls, and the political divide is no longer sharply drawn between money on one side and saving the planet on the other. Much as unexpected business pressure caught social conservatives in Indiana off-guard with their anti-gay “religious freedom” act, a similarly unexpected shift is already starting to materialize in the energy realm.

In fact, the power of specific leading-edge good examples can only be expected to accelerate the process. For example, on March 23, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes reported that Costa Rica had generated 100% of its electricity for the year so far from renewables–geothermal, hydro, wind, and solar. The country hopes to go completely carbon-neutral by 2021.

In addition to the falling profitability of f****l f**ls and the growing momentum of renewables, there’s a third changing business dynamic to consider: The response of the broader business community, which has long suffered from bearing the externalized costs of f****l f**ls. Such costs come in a variety of forms, some of which impact other business more obviously than others. These include specialized government treatment (subsidies, tax credits and exemptions, the costs of Middle East military operations) as well as health impacts, and damage due to c*****e c****e. Given that most powerful industries benefit from government actions which socialize their costs in various ways, there’s not much appetite for challenging f****l f**ls on this ground. Industrial health impacts are similarly uninteresting to most businesses. But the insurance industry directly bears the costs of c*****e c****e as they show up in the form of property damage due to increased frequency and severity of e*****e w*****r events, as well as long-term trends such as rising sea levels. And they, in turn, have to manage those costs somehow, which ultimately means that all other businesses must share in paying these externalized costs.

The first to begin noticing and responding to this were large-scale insurance underwriters, known as reinsurance companies, such as Munich Re and Swiss Re. Ross Gelbspan called attention to the rising insurance costs of g****l w*****g as far back as his 1997 book, “The Heat Is On.” Taking note of these costs, reinsurers began the long-term process of integrating them into their business models as best they could, and educating the primary insurers with whom they did business.

solarkin

Post is too long.
Make point in 100 words or less.

permafrost Loc: Minnesota

Solar,

So much in the article, it was very hard to stop posting.. Much left unposted..

But you are right, far to long a post. Have to work on getting to the point. Short and sweet would be the way to go..

As I said, need to work on that....

solarkin

N.p.
I want Your opinion.
After all We are the movers and shakers.