On July 22nd, Paul Driessen wrote the following:

"It's increasingly obvious why Gore, Hansen and Reid are becoming more shrill and hysterical by the day. The hot air they are trying to blow up our shorts is no basis for economy-killing cap-and-trade rules or ecology-killing forests of wind turbines."

He's dead-bang right. Mr. Driessen correctly points out that it takes vastly more steel and concrete per kilowatt hour generated to build a wind farm than to build a relatively simple, clean-burning, coal-fired or gas-fired power generation facility. Add that to the fact that wind farms are unsightly and noisy and a distinct danger to migrating birds and it's plain to see that they are NOT the answer to our energy needs for the future. Just to replace the electricity we get from coal-fired plants alone with a wind farm would require that one be built that would take up the same space as the entire State of North Carolina!!! Does anyone imagine citizens agreeing to such a thing? Add to all that the fact that wind speeds are only adequate about 1/3rd of the time, where does the needed power come from when the wind is too low--as it usually is during the peak-use times of the year?

You can be certain that the eco-nuts will NOT sit still while we build more steel mills or cement plants to accommodate the demands placed on the current stocks by wind farming. We learned from sad experience that these bug-witted fools will spend any amount necessary to delay or hopefully STOP the construction of something with which the disapprove...like the Telico Dam or almost ANY nuclear power facility. The fact that their stated "concerns" are almost invariably without merit makes no difference whatsoever. As long as they can keep construction tied up in dozens of lawsuits or regulatory litigation, they are happy. Remember Telico? It was stopped because some environmental whackos said the hydroelectric dam's construction to harm the "endangered" snail darter--a small, perchlike fish. Once the dam was delayed to the point of cancellation as being too expensive, lo and behold it was found that the snail darter is found in DOZENS of other streams and wouldn't have been threatened in the slightest. Anyway, how can you "endanger" a FISH without removing the water in which it lives? What difference does it make whether the water is one foot deep or 100? The answer is, of course, no difference at all.

Then we come to "Three Mile Island," touted by the mainstream media as the "worst nucleardisaster in U.S. History." Some "disaster!" No one was killed, no one was injured and the worst exposure to radiation was about the equivalent of three chest x-rays! What Three Mile Island DID show was that, even with stupid human error, the safety systems built into EVERY U.S.-made nuclear power plant worked to perfection and no one was harmed. Yet even today, Three Mile Island is held up as the principle reason why we haven't built another one in decades--even while the rest of the world is switching to nuclear power generation as fast as possible. Even Iran, which is afloat on a virtual sea of oil, is trying to move to nuclear power. Yet the "experts" in the eco-movement have succeeded in stopping all such construction in the U.S.

These so-called "environmentalists" have been proven to be almost blithering idiots and their predictions to be utter nonsense on occasion after occasion, yet Congress LISTENS to them still. One thinks that what those in Congress are actually listening to is the jingle of gold coins in the pockets of those that would either finance THEIR next campaign for re-election or fund the candidacy of an opponent.

The longest-lasting solution to our energy problems is going to be exploration and drilling for oil domestically. I would suggest that OUR production should be restricted from the world markets and earmarked for domestic use only as soon as our production volumes equal our consumption. Then, except for the strategic reserve, any excess productioncan be sold on the world market. That way, we can thumb our noses at OPEC and do THEM some economic damage for a change by driving down the world market price. We know that we have enough oil available in the form of shale oil and as recoverable crude in the outer continental shelf, in AMWR and even close-in off both the western and eastern seaboards and in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida. Estimates are that there's enough untapped oil in those places to supply all our oil needs for a couple of centuries! Not only that, but the U.S. has 24% of the world's supply of coal and the WW II Germans proved that coal CAN be made into "synthetic crude oil" at a cost that's MORE than competitive when "natural" crude oil markets for anything above $30 per barrel. That would increase our oil supply good for another 200 years. Certainly in the next 400 years, an economic substitute can be found and put into common use! If it can't, we're doomed as a species anyway because we'd be too stupid to survive.