#18 From where I sit, Republicans do need to clarify their image up to a more modern sheen. Where do they come down on issues like green technology and progress? Coal and gas chuggers seem awfully outdated and expensive with all the alternatives out there, I worry about Republicans associating themselves with these. Our national zeitgeist always seems to want to go in the direction of progress, so Republicans are shooting themselves in the feet if they can't get behind some solar, some compressed air CAT cars, some wind turbines, something. America wants to go green. So Republicans would do well to capitalize on that, and move forward.
To the extent that America really wants to go green, it's because America is a bunch of stupid people engaged in a mass spree of destroying their own industries.
The Americans, or the Democrapic Party half of the Americans, TALK about wanting to go green whenever someone wants to drill for oil, or mine coal, or manufacture aluminum or steel or plastics, or manufacture products made of aluminum or steel or plastics, (i.e. everything to do with industrial civilization) and works to throttle it.
RIGHT BEFORE THEY GO DOWN TO THE [DELETED] WAL-MART AND BUYS THE [DELETED] MADE IN CHINA, WHERE THEY BOUGHT THE REMAINS OF OUR CUT-UP STEEL MILLS AND MELTED THEM DOWN FOR SCRAP, AND HAVE NEW COAL PLANTS COMING ONLINE AT THE RATE OF ABOUT ONE EVERY TWO WEEKS.
THEN, they go down to the Murphy Oil Gas station in front of the Wal-Mart and they buy gasoline made from about 65% imported oil from places like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia oil.
For the last twenty-five years we've basically hobbled and destroyed the domestic energy industry in this country, not because we have a slavish devotion to oil, but because we've believed all we had to do was wreck it and alternatives would magically appear. Well, the only alternatives that have magically appeared have been imported-from-overseas oil and imported-from-China manufactured goods.
And the big plan to have everyone make their living from financial services instead has, in the last year or so, turned into a real disaster. It isn't going to work.
IF solar and wind worked as well as coal people would be using both of those more; one of the big Lies of Omission they haven't said about solar and wind is that turning over the base generation to that not only makes power more expensive, but the irregular output requires the presense of more load-leveling plants, most of them natural gas.
Germany is the perfect example of this. They decided to replace their coal plants with wind and solar and natural gas, because of the lesser amount of greenhouse gasses. You need the natural gas because it's the only sort of power plant that can come online in time to prevent interruption of service and other problems with wind and solar. But what they wound up with was replacing local coal with "Former" Soviet Natural Gas plus wind and solar around the edges.
It's made former KGB agents richer and more powerful, but it hasn't done anything for the environemnt or Germany's economy. Except made them more anxious to please their suppliers.
"Sure, Vlad, how many Georgians do you want to bring back into your servitute today?"
And the American public are stupid hypocrites too; they're not making their industry any cleaner, they're just moving it to China.
And given the choice between a conventional car made in China by a coal-powered factory at half the price of a compressed-air car made in a wind/solar powered factory here, they're goign to pick the Chinese car.
(With hybrids it gets even worse, because they take more energy to make than regular cars, with their big battery packs).
The Spot price for oil _right now_ in the West is $ 60.00/bbl. China has long term contracts with Russia for $ 20.00/bbl, to run their cars and trucks and trains, power their factories, and make plastics out of.
I've watched them wreck domestic production of oil for twenty-five years while they wished on windmills and compressed air. All it's resulted in is price differentials such as those, and the destruction of American heavy industry.
And if solar power ever becomes viable... the solar power plants would be made out of steel, and plastic, and aluminum, and maybe a little silicon, and obscure rare earths of the sort everyone else has more of because they can actually get permits to mine them.
Guess who's going to dominate the business for making solar plants? The people who actually built enough coal plants to have a viable heavy industry economy in their country.
Which right now and for the forseeable future, isn't the United States. |
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Saturday that it's time for the Republican Party to give up its "nostalgia" for the heyday of the Reagan era and look forward, even if it means stealing the winning strategy deployed by Democrats in the 2008 election.