Lamar Alexander Misses the Point
Posted on July 28, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized |
To a lot of people, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would actually be against renewable energy. It’s a little bit like being against puppies. Yet these opponents exist, and I’m sorry to say some are warming seats in the United States Senate.
Take Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, for example. Sen. Alexander hails from a part of the country that is home to “six of the nation’s 10 largest carbon-dioxide-emitting coal-fired power plants,” according to Tennessean.com. You might think that Alexander is somehow beholden to the coal industry because of this, or that his Martha’s Vinyard property and the debate over the Cape Wind project might influence him, or that the campaign contributions that flow his way from the most carbon-dioxide producing utility in the country are the source of his clean energy antipathy. Not so, says the Senator. He doesn’t like wind power, he claims, for aesthetic reasons. “I think they absolutely destroy the landscape.”
One of Sen. Alexander’s favorite examples is a 18 turbine wind farm on Buffalo Mountain in Tennessee. Built on the site of an abandoned strip mine. Hard to imagine the turbines aren’t an improvement.
Let’s be honest: there are places in this country that are pristine and unspoiled, and in the best of all possible worlds it would be nice to leave those vistas untouched. But if we don’t build clean power, we’ll be building coal, oil and gas fired power stations. And pumping more carbon into the atmosphere. As one op-ed put it, all that wilderness is going to be worth a lot less when global warming gets done with it.
Another of the Senator’s objections to wind power is that there isn’t much of it being produced. That was part of the circular logic he used in justifying his strong opposition to a national Renewable Portfolio Standard, a program that would require utilities to geta certain amount of their power from clean energy sources like wind and solar. It’s the law in a couple of dozen states and has proved an effective method of jump starting the clean energy industry.
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[...] Tennessee Senator (you guessed it, a Republican) Lamar Alexander is a moron. He thinks wind farms “destroy the landscape“. To a lot of people, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would actually be against renewable energy. It’s a little bit like being against puppies. Yet these opponents exist, and I’m sorry to say some are warming seats in the United States Senate. [...]
I am not a big fan of Lamar Alexander, but in the case of wind he gets it right. On a per KW generation basis, wind is more expensive than nuclear power. It is heavily subsidized by US tax payers, and always requires fossil fuel backup for windless days, which in some parts of the country is most of the time in the summer. Far from being a moron, Alexander has figure the problems out. Alexander just thinks that there are better ways to spend tax payers money to fight global warming.