Green: Old Tech That Doesn't Work Well

(Click on pic for link to go to U.S. Department of Energy website. You'll need to scroll down to page 13 to view image. Linked is .pdf file.)

Clean energy. Compared to what?

I read a comment recently about a woman who was shocked that people were going out hunting to bring food to the table. Her advice was to leave the poor critters in the forests alone, and shop for meat in a grocery store. As if the meat you buy at a grocery store didn't define the end-point for some other critter.

I'm not so sure the impulse to keep our energy resources locked in the ground isn't related to the type of thinking shown above, rather than a NIMBY response to resource utilization. That is, whenever you hear about electric cars, solar panels, and other forms of Green Technology, that there is a simple, experiential ignorance on display.

We have amazing resources. Not just in this country, but in this state. And they are amazing, not just from the profound amount of resources at our disposal, but in the potential value of those resources. Our state legislature is arguing over the billions of dollars we're short in government revenues versus government expenditures.

Mere billions.

Why mere billions?

Because billions more lie just off-shore of the mouth of the Columbia. And these are amazing resources. We can exploit these resources cheaply. We can develop thousands of new jobs in the energy field. And the state can follow the example of our sister to the North and reap the benefits of billions of dollars in associated resource receipts.

Amazing resources in that we can get the energy to move and build and create. Cheaply. And petroleum and natural gas aren't the only resources at our fingertips. We have significant coal resources within the state, too.

Utilizing these resources would mean new sources of wealth and jobs for Oregonians. But, just like the resources we keep locked up in the woods--how would you define "renewable"?--the policy of our Vision!™ people is to keep these resources locked up. Just as the lady above thinks hunting for critters is morally wrong, yet buying dead carcass at the market is okay.

I've joked in the past about outlawing the use of arsenic in industrial processes. Arsenic. Everybody knows that arsenic is deadly, right? This should be a slam-dunk! Outlaw arsenic! Outlaw "second-hand smoke"! Outlaw poverty! Outlaw all bad stuff! (An omnibus bill.)

The prollem is, outlawing arsenic would shut down the microchip industries in Washington county. And arsenic is just one "dangerous" (scare quotes) substance used in the manufacture of those high-speed miracles. Just another example of the blithe ignorance that fuels our public policy debate over high-tech, Green Choices.

There's nothing "Green" about Green Technology. It's all a ruse to perpetuate the kind of myth exhibited in the lady's thinking above. You want Green Cars? Mountain tops must needs be scraped to come up with all the constituent components that will be necessary to manufacture these modern miracles. And trillions upon trillions of dollars will be spent to provide these "new" technologies, when they aren't really new after all. They're old technologies. And they are old technologies that simply don't provide low-cost energy. But rather than telling you that simple truth, that solar, wind and other "new" technologies have been around for decades, if not centuries in the case of wind power, the problem is is that these technologies don't provide usable energy cheaply when compared to other sources of old technologies.

Even in their pursuit of transforming our economy from a carbon-based energy system to a new Green basis, there is still something hiding in the woodpile. Whether it's arsenic, copper or whatever, mountains will still be scraped, and resources must be mined from the Earth in order to create these New, old tech jobs.

I bring this all up due to the effort by the OR150 project to indoctrinate our kids with the type of thinking on display in the woman's comments above. The Oregon 150 people were in Astoria on Tuesday, talking to your kids about how they need to get involved with the Vision!™

"'By giving students an active role in structuring community organizing efforts, we're looking to ensure peer-to-peer outreach and to embed a transformational process that not only gets young people thinking about their communities, but becoming active in them as well,' said Aili Schreiner, Project Manager of Project 2059."

Great. The "community organizers" are getting access to the schools, but there is no balance provided as a counter-point to the silliness that they preach. You can see what they're thinking in the video embedded on their website. (I'm sorry to link to this in that I don't want to highlight the words of the young girls in their video. But remember, she simply represents a level of education that reflects the best work and efforts of her public school teachers.)

Green Tech. Old tech that simply doesn't work very well. And not as cheaply as those sources of energy that we rely upon, day after day. What to do? Increase the price of those sources so that we simply ignore that we're using stupid tech at higher prices. What to do? Well, how's that Man Made Global Warming Crisis coming? A little cap-and-trade and Bingo! We'll tax the Sh&t out of cheap energy, killing those industries. So we have to use old, expensive tech that doesn't work very well.

And then we'll call it good.