(The following was originally a Facebook comment in response to this article, “The US Is Littered With More Than 14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines”.)
by Rod D. Martin
November 18, 2011
This is the problem. Everyone wants the whole world to “go Green” on the unstated, utterly impossible premise that all forms of energy are equal, and that the only reason we use one over the other is some big conspiracy somewhere. Most of the people talking — and encouraged to talk by leftist politicians and by industry people looking for huge government subsidies — don’t have the slightest idea about different forms of energy: they’ve just been fed this big bill of goods and spew out simplistic demands that are wholly infeasible.
We use oil because there’s lots of it, it’s a liquid (so you can store it in a tank), and it produces a LOT of energy when you burn it. Ethanol produces a LOT less energy when you burn it, and takes a LOT more energy to produce in the first place (not to mention, we use corn to produce it, so we’re driving up the price of food for millions of starving people).
But wind and solar are FAR worse, for reasons the vast majority has never thought of in its simple little life: as you’ve pointed out, there’s no good way to store it, AND you can’t transmit it over long distances because electric wires are like leaky pipes. The longer the journey, the more you lose. And the journey required to lose WAY too much is pretty darn short.
The real solutions are oil, natural gas and coal. Maybe nuclear. And we’ve now found ways to produce so much natural gas it’s just crazy, so even if we didn’t have lots and lots of the other two (and we do, actually), the natural gas discoveries just in the past five years completely change the future of American energy, radically for the better.
But the Green lobby doesn’t want that. It’s too invested in things that don’t work, largely because those things have been made popular through lies about their actual capabilities and problems, which makes it possible to get huge government subsidies (corporate welfare), which then lines the pockets of guys like Al Gore who did the popularizing in the first place. It’s as corrupt as heck. And it’s time we blow the lid off it.