alternative energy

Last month’s wind-turbine fire near Palm Springs, CA, that dropped burning debris on the barren ground below, serves as a reminder of just one of the many reasons why people don’t want to live near the towering steel structures. In this case, no one was hurt as the motor fire was in a remote, unincorporated area of Palm Springs. But imagine if it was located just hundreds of feet from your back door—as they are in many locations—and the burning debris was raining down into your yard where your children were playing or onto your roof while you are sleeping.

On Tuesday, May 31, Heartland Science Director Dr. Jay Lehr, PhD, was a guest on the radio show “Energy Matters” with host Scott Hennen on The Legendary Voice of the Northern Plains. Lehr was invited on to discuss the EPA’s Methane Rule as a part of President Obama’s “Climate Action Plan.”

Bill Gates doesn’t believe that those who operate within the free market can ever be compelled to produce alternative fuel sources, so he suggests that the government spend untold millions on it instead.

While the rich get richer, off of DOE loans, EPA grants and foreign investments in alternative energy, America’s poor are paying an ever-higher cost just to keep warm.

Thirty states, including Ohio, have renewable portfolio mandates. These laws require a certain percentage of electricity to be generated from renewable sources, primarily wind and solar power.

Anyone who travels across this country or lives near the vicinity of wind farms can describe the increasing industrial blight wind farms impose on previously unmarred vistas and formerly wild, undeveloped locales.

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, my name is Bernard Weinstein and I am the Associate Director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University (SMU) and an adjunct professor of business economics at SMU’s Cox School of Business. Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today.

In the same way Americans are discovering that the Cold War that was waged from the end of World War Two until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is not over, Americans continue to be subjected to the endless, massive, global campaign to foist the hoax of global warming–now called climate change—on everyone.

Have you ever been shopping for a computer and felt like the salesman used “tech-talk” and a lot of words you didn’t understand just to confuse you so he could “up-sell” you on the “latest” and most expensive features? The Obama Administration and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are employing this tactic and other sorts of “used-car-salesman” tricks in an attempt to sell the public on expensive and unpopular regulations that would require existing electricity power plants to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent of 2005 base-levels by the year 2030. It’s a smog-and-mirrors trick, nothing more.

Before President Obama took office in 2009, the amount of electricity being produced by coal-fired utilities was approximately fifty percent of the total. Today it is approximately forty percent and, when the Environmental Protection Agency regulations take effect as of June 2, more such utilities are likely to close their doors. The basis for the regulations is utterly devoid of any scientific facts.

Americans take electricity for granted. Electricity powers our lights, our computers, our offices, and our industries. But misguided environmental policies are eroding the reliability of our power system.

Consumers considering installing solar panels on their rooftops have far more to think through than the initial decision to “go solar.”

They may search for the best price, only to discover, as customers in central Florida did, that after paying $20,000-40,000 for their systems, they are stuck with installations that may be unusable or unsafe. BlueChip Energy—which also operated as Advanced Solar Photonics (ASP) and SunHouse Solar—sold its systems at environmental festivals and home shows. Buyers thought they were getting a good deal and doing the right thing for the environment. Instead, they were duped.

While this week’s Senate Climate Action Task Force all-night marathon may seem like the ultimate comedy, real climate scientists are crying over the event. It’s not just because of the numerous basic science mistakes made by the senators.