Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Democrats ridiculous on fossil fuel stance

Harry Reid was on Fox News today talking about how we need to get away from oil and coal. He said it's causing global warming and it's "making us sick."

Okay, that's fine. I can live with that argument. So why is it that the democratic party, then, of which Harry Reid is a leader of, against every "realistic" effort to get this nation away from coal and oil?

They have consistently been adamantly opposed to any new drilling in the United States, against slant drilling under our oceans, against drilling in ANWAR, and they are also against nuclear power. All of these options would offer guaranteed results, as opposed to other more far fetched options.

(Note: I'm not opposed to other options, such as ethonol powered vehicles, windmills, solar energy, but none of those are nearly as effective as nuclear power for example at the present time. And even hydrogen powered cars or a more efficient battery, both of which I would love to see, are at present no more than a pipe dream.)

And it was John McCain who states he would offer an capitalistic-like incentive to pay the first person who invents a powerful battery that would allow the U.S. to sway from oil, and not Barack Obama.

Obama, by the way, is against any new types of drilling in the U.S., and would rather punish the oil industry executives rather than getting government obstacles out and allowing the free market to solve its own problems.

Democrats may be very convincing in their claims regarding global warming, but they fail to offer proof effective alternatives. Instead, their talk is something like this: "Coal and oil are causing global warming, but we are going to create more obstacles making it impossible to get away from coal and oil."

Heck, I can come up with a more convincing argument than Harry Reid about how coal is bad for the environment. Did you know that mercury gets past the scrubbers in the smokestacks and into our atmosphere, only to return to earth in the form of smog and acid rain?

That mercury, coupled with the mercury that naturally seeps into the water supply, is the reason the FDA recommends limiting the amount of seafood you eat. Pregnant women are recommended not to eat seafood at all.

Here's another big one. I bet you didn't know this. I will quote this directly from "Power to Save the World: The Truth about Nuclear Energy," by Gwyneth Cravens:

"A 1000 megawat coal plant... freely disperses about 27 metric tons of radiologic material a year, exposing people to much more low level radiation than a nuclear plant would. But it's the nuclear industry that by regulation must track and isolate the smallest actual or estimated quantities of radioactive substances and front the gigantic bill for doing so... On average, fossil fuels expose the American population to about a hundred times more low level radiation than nuclear power plants do."

Everybody knows that there are advantages and disadvantages to coal. The truth is that coal is cheap. The truth is that foreign oil is cheap. And that is why the free market goes for coal and foreign oil and makes little effort to seek alternative energy sources.

So, if coal and oil are so bad, why don't our leaders in Washington, like Mr. Harry Reid, compromise with other leaders in Washington and provide an incentive for entrepreneurs to seek alternative energy forms that work.

I'm tired of democratic leaders in Washington bloviating about how "sick" the world is because of fossil fuels, and then at the same time blocking every effort to do anything about it.

That's the thought of the day.

1 comment:

Dioscuri said...

I don't see the problem with nuclear energy. It's clean, efficient, and safe. Miami is nuclear-powered and they've never had an issue with it; I'd much rather have a clean nuke plant in my backyard than a smoke-belching coal plant like the one I can see across the lake.