For more than a half century, this country has wrangled with the issues of fossil fuel availability, pollution, and energy (in)dependence. With one exception, energy resources have concerned and befuddled every President over this period. The populace is intoxicated with cheap energy, and who wouldn’t be if it was available? Cheap energy resources, like the Erie Canal almost two centuries earlier, changed the energy and consequent economic landscape of a nation. And, it had been just that amounting to, up till now, the insignificant transference of our wealth to other nations. But what the… We’re rich, and became richer. Well, we were rich.
One particular, more-or-less conservative, solution has been to approve and issue more licenses for drilling and resultant production to prove more energy reserves. This view was concomitant with alternative energy sources as they became competitive. (Coal has always been there; we scrub it more than ever to make its use cleaner, i.e. more acceptable.) Another, more-or-less liberal solution has been to develop and rely upon the green alternative energy resources such as wind, solar, bio, geothermal, and more. These solutions, while sounding promising, even fantastic, have gained traction with many. They have gained a total commitment from the current Administration. “Green is good,” has become the mantra of this contingent. Green is good, it seems, has become the “good-as-gold” administrative policy and thus strategy.
Case closed? Please wait a minute. Take the quiz. Are green technologies worth our consideration? Yes. Do they have merit? Yes. Are there working examples? Yes. Have they been proven? Yes. Have they been proven to scale, that is on massive long-term deployment? No. Indeed, a big no is issued. There are hopes and promises, but this is a well traveled path. Later.
Perhaps, the wind turbine advocates are correct. Perhaps not. Anecdotes abound. However, like any new drug emerging on the market, the wind turbine technology needs testing. I mean, not testing whether it produces power. It does, but what about testing its efficacy to scale? Does anyone know the economic and ecological consequences of large scale wind farms? For wind energy, preliminary evidence indicates serious issues with heat generation and the destruction of wild life. What about replacement of mechanical and electronic replacement turbine components? What about the training of technicians? What about servicing in general? What are the operational details? For solar technologies, what do we know about longevity, weather calamities, technological failure rates? For geothermal and bio technologies and resources, do we know anything at all – except they’re cool ideas showing promise? Risk must be reviewed.
Can any serious minded government official invest our energy future, and therefore the security for the next generation, on alternate energy venues without substantial, thorough, and comprehensive wide scale testing? The future of so many people is at stake, not to mention the future of a country. For alternative energies, what we need is an FDA (i.e. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Food and Drug Administration), a highly non-biased agency to determine the validity and long-term consequences of new drugs, for alternative energy supplies. The United States has many agencies for testing new technologies, and particularly for drugs they have proved that caution is the better part of valor. Singularly, the FDA has resisted and rebuffed numerous entreaties from public officials and lobbyists to relent, to release, and to relinquish their standards in favor of this new drug or that. To date, they have not. Think of Thalidomide, maybe Laetrile, if you will.
We do have the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), but it is not critical but rather a biased energy advocate of anything alternative. We need more than advocacy. The EPA is currently an instrument of an uninformed political energy philosophy.
We need an unbiased science and economics of alternative energy. Therefore, there should be an unbiased agency to test the long term effects of massively deployed alternate energy technologies. Sure, fossil fuels have received a bad rap, perhaps deservedly so. The lessons of fossil fuel technologies have been learned only over decades of application. Now, the black flags are flying. Cautions about exploring, developing, and producing oil resources are well studied. Even still, fictions about new underground energy technologies abound. Look for example at the highly emotional issues surrounding fracking, the newest hope to develop resources yet in the ground.
But when venturing into wind, solar, and bio – type interventions in our energy sector, who is the watchdog, who is testing, and who is evaluating the effects of implementation? Mostly, what we have are for-profit advocates, green-at-any-cost activists, and totally uninformed supporters of whatever is not oil/coal. Nobody, it seems, is serious, clean, and sober about looking out for our country! Feeling good is great, but let’s put the politics aside.
We removed the politics from of the technologies of bridges, roads, airplanes, jet engines, medicine, and drugs, very much to our benefit. Why not energy?
NOTE. The other green energy resource is nuclear power. So many advantages were promoted and promised at the beginning, only a few decades ago. It was the hope and the promise of our energy future. We bought the promises and maintained the hope. Nuclear plants soon dotted the planet’s energy landscape. Only much later, with massive deployment, were the horrifically serious issues exposed. We, too, were and continue to be exposed to those "issues."
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