The Obama administration is still in the throes of global warming mentality. They have cancelled leases for oil and gas in the huge deposits in western states like Montana. The vast boom going on just to the north in Alberta has not impressed Interior Secretary Salazar. They want to take millions of acres out of the energy search by naming them wilderness, just as Bill Clinton created a huge wilderness area out of good potential energy fields at the end of his administration. They have not made nuclear power plants any easier to build. The Gulf oil leases are still blocked and the moratorium, while allegedly ended, continues in a slow down. The only energy and his acolytes are interested in is “renewable” such as wind and sun. These are boutique power sources and even these are being blocked by Democratic politicians.
But the project is hardly shovel ready. Several regulatory hurdles remain, and opponents of the wind farm have vowed to go to court, potentially stalling Cape Wind for several more years.
For years the Cape Wind project has been the focusof pitched battles splitting politicians and environmental groups. While some environmentalists are prepared to go to court to stop the project, other major groups, including the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, support it.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, whose family compound overlooks Nantucket Sound and who died last year, had opposed the project, saying it was a giveaway to a private developer.
It has taken nine years to get this far. In California, another lefty state, a big solar project is being fought by enviros and Democrats. I wonder if the left wants any energy developed. It seems insane but we are getting very close to a tipping point when there will not be time to build new projects and find more oil and gas.
The Democrats, and the vast array of “activists” whom they enable, have demonstrated hostility to all practical forms of energy production and distribution. This is not just a matter of oil & gas drilling: as we have discussed many times on this blog, the U.S. electrical system faces a problematic future. There is every likelihood that, under a Democratic administration/Congress:
a)The building of new coal plants would go from “difficult” to “impossible”
b)The building of nuclear plants would continue to be virtually impossible
c)Even the building of new natural-gas-fired plants would be severely delayed by environmental lawsuits and regulatory maneuvering based on the CO2-is-a-pollutant theory.
Solar and wind, beloved of Democrats, have their uses, but they also have their limitations. I see no evidence that either Obama or the Dem Congressional leadership has any interest in understanding the technical and economic factors that govern the extent to which these technologies can be practically employed. The intermittent nature of wind and usable sun, the difficulty of storing electricity, the supply-chain constraints which govern the large-scale introduction of any new technology–there is much less interest in these things than in the glib repetition of catch-phrases. And even the use of environmentally-blessed technologies will be greatly inhibited by environmentalist protests against the transmission lines required to connect these systems to the cities that need their power. These activists would, of course, gain great impetus from a Democratic administration.
Obama talks a lot about the middle class. The existence of a large and affluent middle class is enabled by widely available and reasonably priced energy, especially electricity. If electric rates are driven up by a factor of 2X or 3X, as is entirely possible with Democratic policies, there will be not only a direct effect on consumers, but an effect on virtually all workers as U.S. businesses–especially manufacturing businesses but also things like data centers–become less competitive.
Lenin once remarked that “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification.” Our present “progressives” seem more interested in de-electrification. Where the New Deal (and the Soviets) wanted to build hydroelectric dams, today’s “progressives” are, for the most part, more interested in destroying them.
Remember, electrical infrastructure is a long-leadtime item, and if we dig outselves into a deep hole in this matter, it will take a long, long time to dig ourselves out..
That was written in 2008. Read the whole thing. It did a pretty good job of predicting the Obama administration’s policies.