Democrats Breaking Wind
Suppose, for a moment, that you are the only person in America that can understand the Democrats’ energy plan. Let’s say you can explain how we can be less dependent on foreign oil by continuing to ban drilling for our own domestic oil.
Let’s say you honestly believe the answer to our energy crisis is inflating our tires. Perhaps you can explain how making energy more expensive by banning coal and nuclear power plants in Wisconsin is going to help consumers and the economy.
This week, the Wall Street Journal pointed out another energy contradiction you can use to amuse thinking people by trying to explain it. A television ad supporting Barack Obama implies he’s going to lessen our independence on foreign oil by cheerleading for wind energy. Yet, whenever efforts to build more windmills are offered, it’s the environmentalists that block implementation.
Environmentalists, who say they want clean energy, oppose windmills for two main reasons. First, they don’t approve of the aesthetic degradation caused by the large windmill blades. In other words, they don’t want to look at them. Second, they oppose the means by which the electricity would actually be transmitted to consumers; namely, more power lines.
In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."
And thus, the incoherent Democratic energy policy moves on – caught hopelessly between promising energy independence and actually implementing it.
