$45 Trillion Too Far
Looking around the Drudge Report lately, one will find a sense of impending financial doom all around. Headlines like, "DOW PLUNGES 400", and "JOBLESS RATES JUMPS 5.5%", and my all time favorite, "GLOBAL FEARS PUSH OIL PRICE TO NEW RECORDS". But despite all that, I see one headline that scares me more than any other... "$45 TRILLION NEEDED TO COMBAT GLOBAL WARMING". That is exactly the thing we need right now with all the other economic doom and gloom scenarios we have with oil prices and the housing market and other threats that we can't see coming, do we really want to spend $45 TRILLION on Global Warming?
The arguments for and against Global Warming are well known, and I don't need to delve in them right now. Suffice to say, I don't believe in Global Warming. The article starts out with a real "feel good" situation:
The world needs to invest $45 trillion in energy in coming decades, build some 1,400 nuclear power plants and vastly expand wind power in order to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, according to an energy study released Friday.
$45 trillion to cut greenhouse gasses in HALF? Nuclear power is a reliable and powerful source of energy, and there have been only two cases of large scale nuclear meltdowns on record. But what isn't told about nuclear power is that there have been eight other smaller scale meltdowns that didn't result in any kind of environmental or human effects. These are situations where the reactors had a problem that averted larger scale meltdowns because of the bravery and intellect of some courageous technicians. So why not put the plant away from populations, out in the middle of the desert? Nuclear power is only effective if its close enough to urban areas, making the possibility for meltdown a bad consequence to this effective way of providing energy. And the 32 new power plants a year that the report calls for, (that's 1,344 plants by 2050), can be subject to delays that will be rushed through by politicians, making them liable to defects and problems that compromise the safety of the plant.
And wind power? Ted Kennedy didn't want them by his estate, because they ruin the skyline. We'd have to put these out in the middle of nowhere, minimizing their effectiveness as well. Anyone traveling on Route 30 towards Bedford can see these turbines on both sides of the road, and while they are an eye sore, they provide energy to the neighboring towns that would have to pay top dollar for natural gas or other means of heating and electric utilities. And with wind turbines costing one fifth what they did in the 1980s, we can swallow the eyesore that they would be to get the energy they provide. But they're not the whole answer, and we'd have to produce 17,000 turbines annually, (714,000 by 2050), would be quite a tall task for an industry not suited for such large scale production.
I think that this is a step to far, and Congress agrees with me, (I'm surprised they could agree with anybody). They blocked the first bill on this subject that hit the floor. Its not okay to saddle the American taxpayer with the burden of the world's transgressions upon nature, when China and other industrialized nations have no restrictions on pollution. Watch the Summer Olympics this summer and tell me that they do their part to fight global warming. We take on responsibilities that make us an example for the world, but when those who mock and scorn our role in the world as the world's police say that we need to take on this burden of environmental war, it is a step too far. We should be stewards of the earth and do what we can to take care of it, but we shouldn't have to make men, women and children poor because of our need to clear our consciouses for the way we have abused the Earth to this point in history. We must move on and make the best of a bad situation, and ride out the storm if that is our future.
