The feds massive cap and tax climate bill is up for a vote today and might even pass the House with all the deals that have been cut. The bill, birthed at 600-plus pages, is now 1,200 pages long. The nearly three reams of paper will cost you about $1,000 a year in new taxes or add-on fees by conservative estimates. Liberal estimates put your cost at about $200 a month extra or $2,400 annually for your energy needs.
About $4 billion a year is dedicated to be shipped overseas to people who plant trees or promise not to cut some down. All this in the name of fighting “global warming,” a theoretical menace that lives and flourishes in the minds of liberals but falls flat when held up to scientific scrutiny.
The bill is now so well massaged that even environmentalists don’t like it. They point out that being able to buy tax credits in lieu of curbing emissions means emissions won’t be curbed which should be the point of any meaningful legislation.
But this bill, like all congressional forays, is not about the environment, it’s about power and growing the federal government. The bill covers such a wide array that members of Congress can expect to raise billions in bribes, excuse me, campaign contributions, from individuals more than willing to pony up for a little favored protection.
Anyone, and I do mean anyone, who votes for this boondoggle should be permanently thrown out of office, never allowed to return.
The privacy threat to you from this bill is enormous. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “Every aspect of our lives must be subject to inventory.” Translation – energy rationing. You will be inventoried for your driving habits and told to curtail them. You will be inventoried for your recreational habits and told to curtail them. You will be inventoried on home energy use and told to curtail it. This is especially troubling for areas like ours where air conditioning is a must. Get prepared to start sweating — a lot if this bill passes.
And then of course there’s that “smart grid technology” thing. A smart grid can more easily move power around without as much bleeding off of power as the current grid — but it has another feature too. Smart grids can talk to smart appliances and smart central air units and shut them down without your knowledge or approval if electrical demands are high. Your fridge will stop, your freezer will stop and your A/C will stop, all at the whim of someone far away that does not know and does not care about your needs at the time.
What the bill doesn’t have is provisions for nuclear power, the only clean alternative energy out there with enough oomph to replace fossil fuels. That tells you that energy will be rationed because wind, ethanol and solar are hopelessly inefficient (but they’re subsidized due to their hopelessness).
One good example of things to come is Jacksonville, Florida where energy companies are, to get ahead of the coming fed mandates, buying power from individual solar and wind producers to put on their grid. The problem is they are paying these people 32 cents per kilowatt-hour for something that can be easily generated by other means for a nickel. Of course the utility company is not absorbing this giant loser, they just passed the exorbitant costs to the customers of the grid. That's a portent of things to come if we don’t establish a nationwide nuclear power system.
Nukes got a bad rap from Three Mile Island; a mishap that was widely overblown and in fact was completely contained with no deaths or serious injuries. That was back when control rooms were hopelessly complex and plumbers, rather than engineers or experienced technical crews, were often used to plumb the plants. One of them put a water valve in backwards at TMI, ultimately causing the incident.
A lot has happened since then. Most of the government run plants were sold off to private investors who rebuilt the control rooms, checked and retrofitted the designs and are now running these same plants at 90 percent efficiency compared to the 50 percent the governments were getting.
Large amounts of nuclear waste are not normally a product of nuclear reactors being used to generate power. The above average waste in this country is due to Jimmy Carter, who signed off on an order banning the reprocessing of nuclear waste. If you properly reprocess the waste, it is salvaged and reclaimed for medical and other purposes, mostly leaving behind the unexciting U-238 isotope, which is what you find in granite countertops and just about as dangerous. What’s left as waste is miniscule. France, who is 80 percent nuclear, has more than 40 years worth of waste stored in a very small basement in one of their government buildings. That’s what’s leftover when you do things right and Jimmy Carter wasn’t part of your political past.
Nuclear fuel is a wonderful thing. Twelve ounces of enriched uranium is enough to power the city of San Francisco for five years. An equivalent solar array would have to cover thousands of square miles to produce the same energy. Of course the only place with that much empty space and lots of sun is the desert which is far away from population centers. Plus, you have to wash solar panels regularly — where would you get the water?
In case you were wondering we’re not good candidates for wind or solar power in south Louisiana. We’re not in a wind zone onshore and we don’t get enough sun exposure daily (it’s true oddly enough) to make solar efficient. Plus solar panels don’t work very well if they get too hot. Go figure.