Mean Joe Green #15: McCain’s Vision for Renewable Energy.
GOP candidate John McCain has his eyes on nuclear energy to address our current climate crisis.
Nothing like solving one problem while creating another. I can understand that he may hate the sun for what it does to his pasty white skin. And that he may hate the wind for messing up his well placed comb-over–but if he could just look past all that and see that both the sun and the wind could provide our country free, clean energy he’d have many more fans in the REAL world.
Could it be the one time cost for a wind turbine and/or solar panels that’s keeping the energy industry, John, and many of his right-wing good-old-boys from falling in love with the right alternative? Without the option for a wide base of customers to gouge repeatedly (ie. fuel costs) they all may be thinking–what’s the point?
<
For the record, if the choices were coal or nuclear–I’d choose nuclear. But those aren’t the choices–wind and solar are viable clean alternatives. Especially when we, as a society, learn to conserve and re-use more and spend a lot less.
Right on. Except that nuclear energy may be even more dangerous than the use of coal or oil. I loved the cartoon.
Yeah. I like the point about the continuing flow of fuel costs for coal vs. one time up-front capital costs for solar and wind. Investors love the flows, but the rest of us don’t.
Wind and solar do not supply reliable power. They are energy sources that are only available on a schedule that varies with the weather. Together, after several decades of generous subsidies, they produce less than 1% of the US electricity supply and about one half of one percent of our total energy supply.
Human beings have understood that there is energy in the wind and the sun for many centuries. Smart people throughout the ages have figured out ways to collect this energy in sails, windmills, water heaters, and in biomass. Most of those smart people, however, have been rather dissatisfied with the amount of energy available, the effort that it took to collect the energy and the fact that the energy is not available at all times of need.
Nuclear fission, like combustion, has some disadvantages, but it is reliable and controllable by humans. It has two huge advantages, however, in that it is clean enough to run inside a sealed submarine and it produces a tiny quantity of controllable, concentrated waste. Done correctly, it also has the potential to be very competitive on a cost basis with coal, the next cheapest alternative.
It is also very new compared to all other energy sources. The very basic physical process was discovered well after my still quite healthy mother was born.
Starting from nothing, nuclear fission expanded quickly enough so that in 1993 it was producing more electricity each year than the whole grid did in 1960. The projections for its growth as of 1973 indicated that it would completely eliminate coal and natural gas from electrical power production by 2000.
Of course, the coal and gas producers did not like that prospect AT ALL and took effective action to slow the development of their main competition.
John McCain’s plan for 45 new nuclear plants is mostly wrong in its modesty. A better plan might be to resurrect Gerald Ford’s 1976 plan that called for 200 or more new reactors along with a program to reuse slightly used fuel and to breed new fuel.
Rod,
Good points. But to refute some of your points–it needs to be said that renewable energy has never had the financial backing it needs for widespread use and mass success. My belief is to fully fund the best options first (wind/solar/tidal…) and then fill in any holes with the next best (nuclear?) and so on.
There also needs to be more emphasis on conservation. We’ve gone from being a respectably thrifty nation (one which both of my grandfathers fought for in WW2) to a glutonous society with a false feeling of entitlement…
Mean Joe Green:
No matter how much anyone invests, the sun will never shine 24 x 7. We know very well exactly what the capability of wind driven propulsion is, we have put many, many millions into some pretty sophisticated development in the name of sport.
The country that your grandfathers (and my father) fought for in WWII could produce a ship and dozens of large aluminum bombers every week. Those accomplishments did not come from a low energy economy.
I do not feel a “false sense of entitlement” but I have direct experience with what it means to live within the capabilities of the sun, biomass and the wind. It is not the lifestyle that I recommend; it tends to limit human endeavor to the act of gathering food and energy.
I second Rod’s reservations: to assert that wind and solar energy can fulfill current energy needs is to fundamentally understand the scale of our energy use. For example, to replace the fossil fuels that we currently use, we’ll need somewhere between 1000 and 3000 nuclear plants, and we’ll probably need to have then on-line by 2020. McCain has proposed, what? 20 to 30 new plants? Hmmm, in the time frame that he has suggested, something like 60+ plants are scheduled to be decommissioned. This should give an inkling of how far removed from reality the current prevailing debate is. Fortunately, North America has boatloads of coal, which will scale. As did Germany in WWII, and South Africa during the Apartheid era, the US will turn to coal liquefaction to bridge the gap between oil, natural gas and … whatever happens next.
‘fundamentally mis-understood’ that should have read.
We should all listen to the silly liberals and do what they say. We should trust that their motives are wholesome. Forget the fact that they are all making billions of dollars off of forcing us to new energy.
George Soros, we can always trust that you’ll make millions at our expense.
“Barack Obama,”
I see that your politics has blinded you, much like most other conservatives. Although no politician is as scrupulous as we’d like him/her to be, you’re absurd to believe that liberal politicians make billions off of “new energy.” It’s Republicans that profit more on supporting the oil and gas industries (might I add, definitely NOT in the billions) than Dems that try to supplant those industries with the ones you’re discussing. It’s people like you who keep this country cemented in the place that it’s in right now. And also- your snide comments aren’t appreciated- you can freely express your views without the sarcasm in the future.
[...] Another funny one from Red, Green, and Blue’s resident cartoonist, Joe Mohr [originally published at RGB on June 21, 2008] [...]