Dan Coffey net
Ask yourself: If you had a budget, how would you spend it to make the biggest difference for global warming? Would you hire lawyers, stop wind farms, or pay for consultants? What if your children’s future depended upon your decisions, would you spend the money the same way?
One of the more vexing and confounding issues of our time is the approach a minority of the environmental community has adopted toward renewable energy, specifically wind, solar and geothermal energy sources, and the transmission lines needed to tap into dispersed areas where such energy can be produced.
Wind does not occur in adequate quantities and quality everywhere, neither does solar power work efficiently in all locations. Geothermal sources are limited geographically.
We are faced with a looming, devastating problem in the form of global warming, ocean acidification from massive amounts of dissolved CO2, wildlife loss due to shifting weather patterns, alpine tree death due to Bark Beetles because winters are not cold enough to kill off the beetles, and an accelerating warming of the atmosphere due to the ever increasing concentrations of CO2 and other “trace gases” in the world-wide atmosphere.
The two main contributors of CO2 are transportation and utilities providing what consumers demand. It is consumers who are the polluters, not merely those who make and sell the products to consumers. However, consumers can reduce their use, shift use to lower polluting means, and aide manufacturers and utilities to shift to less polluting means for producing electricity and to vehicles which use less gasoline and produce less CO2.
It is consumers who are driving this process. It is they who drive and they who flip the switch, turn on the computer, surf the internet, twitter their friends, charge their several billion cell phones, and turn on the hundreds of millions of other electricity consuming gadgets.
Nevertheless, those who wish to solve some portion of these problems are also standing squarely in the way of those who are poised to bring substantial amounts of carbon-free wind, solar and geothermal, low carbon electrical energy to consumers.
What is the answer?
Renewable Energy v. Environmentalists
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Dan Coffey fly fishing in Colorado
