Our government’s dumbest energy solution

March 10, 9:12 PMMilwaukee County Conservative ExaminerFrank J. Tamel

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I used to believe that the United States was a forward thinking nation. After all, we were the first to develop air travel, first with nuclear energy, and the only nation to put a man on the moon. We have invented more devices to benefit mankind and have produced more miraculous cures for diseases than any nation in history.

Even our system of government, as envisioned by the founders, was innovative. The very idea that our rights come directly from God was a profound departure from the “Divine Right of Kings” thinking that was held by monarchs and despots across Europe before we became a nation.

We invited the oppressed masses to come to America to breathe the air of a free society. Many who came were poor members of the peasant class, but because of the opportunities to prosper and grow they excelled and provided the world with much of today’s magnificent technology. Our inventions feed, heal, and provide energy to the planet.

So why are we looking backward for solutions to our own energy challenges? It’s amazing that we are so enamored with doing things the old way when there is a vast new frontier out there yet to be explored. Our natural resources are sufficient to sustain us until new technology is developed to address our future needs, so why take a giant step into the ancient past?

Natural gas, coal and oil have been efficiently moving traffic, heating our homes, and lighting our buildings since the turn of the last century. Autos, trucks, and trains have been transporting people and material from one population center to another across the vast landscape called America on ribbons of steel called railroad tracks and rivers of concrete called super highways. Nuclear power plants have been bringing clean, unlimited energy to cities. Coal-powered plants, which provide nearly half our electricity, rely on a resource that is so abundant that it will last hundreds of years. We are also the Saudi Arabia of natural gas which is so abundant that we could heat every home, office building and shopping mall in America for over a century with our known reserves.

Methods for extracting oil and natural gas have become so efficient that gone are the vast oil fields of a few decades ago. We can crush shale to extract oil and drive shafts miles deep into the ocean to tap oil fields below the surface. The foot print required to extract natural gas is measured in square feet rather than acres. We are awash with gas and oil and our ability to find those resources has advanced so that if utilized, they could provide energy for generations. Modern technology has also assured that coal burns cleaner and nuclear energy is safer than it was decades ago.

But somehow our political leaders, who are dependent on the extreme environmental movement for campaign funds, decided that oil, natural gas and nuclear energy are bad things. So, instead of moving forward to develop yet to be discovered alternative energy sources, we have decided to block the use of our natural resources and tax their use until they are unaffordable. As an alternative to these abundant God-provided resources they look way back into the past for solutions; which brings us to windmills.

The left is in love with windmills. They tout windmill technology as exciting and innovative. Windmills might have been considered a great technological advance when they were developed in Persia about 3,000 years ago but they haven’t become much more efficient since the first farmer saw a tent wall billowing in the breeze and came up with the idea. Wind power still remains as one of the poorest ways to bring energy to a region.

Sure a windmill on a farm might work to pump water or grind grain, providing the wind is blowing, but the best we can hope for to run cities with wind power is perhaps a single digit increase in efficiency. Windmills render the land upon which they rest useless for planting crops. They are costly, noisy, need constant maintenance, freeze up in the winter, slaughter thousands of birds, and they are ugly. In fact, they are so ugly that the Kennedy clan blocked efforts of place them off shore in the million-dollar playgrounds where they sail their yachts.

So come on, you lefties, put your wooden shoes in the closet and get your heads out of the Stone Age. Let’s utilize the energy resources we already have to their utmost and at the same time provide real incentives for American entrepreneurs to invent the miraculous energy solutions that we seek for the future.