By OcJim
The talking head for plutocrats, Pretty Boy Paul Ryan, likes to borrow his ideas from others. He doesn’t believe in divisive class rhetoric, he says, except in his statement, “We’re coming close to a tipping point in America where we might have a net majority of takers versus makers..” In effect, his warped credo sees the makers as the 1% and the rest of us are the takers. That’s Ayn Rand talk in her book, “Atlas Shrugged.” I don’t know where she would put him.
When the makers, for example, the energy fat cats – we could just as well say, exploiters — and politicians make the people pay for what economists call the externalities of producing or using certain dirty products like coal and oil, solar power costs us more: we pay for the external costs arising from producing and using the product, and, incredibly, we even subsidize the so-called makers – also known as polluters. We even give fat retirement pay to demagogues and windbags (describes politicians, of course) that spend their careers servicing such energy lobbyists. Is that ironic or gross?
Let’s look at the giant energy companies, for example, to see who the makers are.
If the Exxons and the Chevrons and the Massey Energy misanthropes — to name a few of the big boys – who are variously described as the makers / erstwhile polluters / ever-present exploiters, pay for the aesthetic, social, medical, ecological, government, military, and infrastructure costs their products impose on us, solar power in most states would beat fossil fuel prices hands down.
Just some of these aforementioned costs include the blight on natural beauty (blowing the tops of mountains off, for example), early death and suffering of the vulnerable from pollutants in air, water, and land (e.g., cancer deaths from Koch plants), the global specter of cataclysm to come (displaced millions near coasts), military conquests to free foreign resources (Iraq for the oil), technology of space exploration that we give to them (UAV systems), and the free infrastructure our tax money provides them (roads, bridges and canals).
We can build this same case for many other global companies, but let’s stick with solar power. Media and government are on the corporate payroll. This will make switching to solar power difficult. Daily fossil fuel propaganda continues to steer us wrong. The Energy lobbyists wrote the Bush-Cheney energy bill, and big energy continues to intimidate Obama and Congress. Bush and Cheney brought us Fracking, and Congress is too pro-fossil-fuel to stop this deadly process of getting natural gas.
The media keeps us ill-informed about alternative power. Politicians have proved useless in promoting the common good, especially getting us out of the yoke of fossil fuels and defying monolithic companies that promote them.
We say again, if energy companies internalize (pay for) the damage done through production and use of their products, coal and oil, for example, clean solar power is cheaper. Progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy [like the one for computer technology],” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.
If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal – and that’s even without companies like Massey Energy not paying for mercury in the air and in the fish and dangerous practices killing mine workers.
The big question now is, “Will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach? “
The entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and is actively hostile to alternatives. Time and again The Republican Party has proven that it will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, this while ridiculing technologies like solar.
A heavy user of coal, China may push us aside again and lead the way to solar energy. Within the next four years, solar power in China could be as cheap as coal for generating electricity, according to a think tank with ties to the Chinese government. The Chinese have already outmaneuvered us in hunts for resources and energy in Asia and Africa – actually all over the world.
Will the political mutts in our government lead us down the path of second-rate among the developed countries?
Pretty Boy Paul is only one of many who prostrates before corporate moguls of all stripes. He probably believes – or their money and favors have convinced him — that plutocrats are makers rather than takers of our tax money, cheap labor, our clean air, our future, our jobs and corporate handouts by the likes of Ryan and his ilk.
(In the cartoon above, we can recognize Boehner, McConnell, and Ryan across the top. Who are the others?)
Jim
11 Nov 2011No wrong information. The GOP wants a balanced approach of not throwing out existing proven energy sources (or over regulating them) until there are viable sustainable alternatives. The current level of green energy technology will not sustain our nations energy needs. Example wind energy http://www.rickety.us/2009/08/1-3-billion-wind-turbines-needed-to-replace-coal/ AND http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127 Takes up lots of land. Kills birds. Destroys wildlife. Alters local weather patterns.
Casey
11 Nov 2011Is it that the energy sector bought out Republicans so now they want to protect our most productive energy options or is the energy sector investing in Republicans because Republicans already wanted to protect our most productive energy options?
Jim
11 Nov 2011Casey Bekkum I think it is the latter.
Effective Government
11 Nov 2011@Casey – Yes and Yes. But to be fair, I’m sure Democrats get some of that money, but might be more discerning about who they’ll take it from. With SuperPacs, no one “needs” to know anymore.
Effective Government
11 Nov 2011Fossil fuels want less competition AND they want to keep their subsidies.
I say, level the playing field and invrease green subsidies to the same level as Fossil, or bring the Fossil subsidies down to the green.
Fossil is established, and no longer needs the taxpayers help. Their profits reflect that. Ween them off our teat.
Effective Government
11 Nov 2011”If the Exxons and the Chevrons and the Massey Energy misanthropes — to name a few of the big boys – who are variously described as the makers / erstwhile polluters / ever-present exploiters, pay for the aesthetic, social, medical, ecological, government, military, and infrastructure costs their products impose on us, solar power in most states would beat fossil fuel prices hands down.”
Jim
11 Nov 2011Solar power is not viable at this point except small scale. Every single structure would have to have it’s own solar facility with adequate battery backup to last for night and rainy days. Solar energy technology has not caught up the level of energy needed yet. Solar energy also requires massive amounts of batteries as back up. The production of batteries has a devastating affect on the environment. Will be great once the technology catches up with the need. The government is already subsidizing alternative energy at a great level (can you say Solyandra?) The technology simply is not there yet. http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1077581/solar_power_not_the_brightest_idea/index.html
Taboo Jiver
11 Nov 2011It won’t be long and solar will be an investment worth spending and investing more into. We just went to a talk last night given by Robert Kennedy Jr. @ Emory University and he had many good points to share on how the free capital marketplace will completely be changed by green energy (wind/solar)
Jim
11 Nov 2011Taboo I can’t wait to see it happen. When it is efficient enough to be viable it will turn the economy on it’s head (in a good way I think). Just don’t think we are there yet.
Dan
11 Nov 2011I have spent the last year building Solar fields so I do have some insight here. Jim is correct, Solar is not a viable replacement source of energy yet though Given time it could reduce the amount of energy that comes from fossil fuels such as coal. Hydro already produces much of the electricity here in the south where I live. Solar IMO will never be accessible to most of the general public because of cost for one reason, That would move you off the grid and Uncle Sam wants you on it. It is easier to keep tabs on you that way. The out put of a single panel that I have been installing is between 7.3 amps to 8.8 amps. Lets call it 8 on average. To power your home you would need enough of those panels to produce the necessary amperage. The average home now is a 200 amp service to get to that output you would need 25 of those panels so at $1000.00 a piece (200 to 300 to the power company) You can see the problem. Just to power the necessary appliances you would need 8 of them. Not gonna happen till the prices come way down.
Dan
11 Nov 2011The other issue when it comes to oil is that even if we replaced it entirely as a fuel source we would still need it. There are thousand s of uses for the stuff from fertilizer to pharmaceuticals. There is also the possibility that oil is abiotic and not biotic. There still seems to be some debate as to whether oil is a fossil fuel or just the byproduct of the inner workings of the earth. That would answer the question of how some wells seem to be replenishing the amount of oil in them. It is also a fact that we have about a 300 year supply here in this country even at our current consumption rate. We need to drill here drill now.
Effective Government
12 Nov 2011Solar and wind are already viable and cost effective. I think my quote from your article TabooJive covers WHY oil is not fairly priced. If given similar incentives, subsidies and tax breaks as the one that kills our citizens and soldiers, it would already be competitive.
And speaking of people dying because they knew too much, (conversations at the top of the page today) Nikola tesla, who had as many, if not more patents than Edison, had allegedly designed a system that could wirelessly transmit electricity through the air. The problem for the elite, would have been, how do you monetize something people can get with an antenna for free.
I do not know if the power was to be created any differently, but imagine a world without power lines.
@Dan Volkman The other issue when it comes to oil is that even if we replaced it entirely as a fuel source we would still need it.
Right, but if we’re not burning 80% of it, all of it would be less expensive, and we wouldn’t need to extract it from dangerous (geographically or politically) places. And we wouldn’t need to support governments that hate us, and we wouldn’t have health care issues caused by refining as mush and burning as much, etc.
Jim
12 Nov 2011EG really? Mysterious murders? Conspiracies?
Dan
12 Nov 2011EG, It would be cheaper if we drilled more domestically. That would take up the slack until solar is viable, wind will never be. The cost is prohibitive as the maintenance is very costly.
Michael
12 Nov 2011Electricity wise we SHOULD be creating it at the source of consumption. The amount of energy that is lost pushing all those electrons through our power grid is so wasteful its absurd. Our entire energy infrastructure needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Casey
12 Nov 2011Nuclear is the only alternative energy source I know of that can support a significant portion of our society. Molten salt reactors are much safer than previous nuclear plant designs. Keep in mind that the amount of people that died in fukushima (a decades old dinosaur of a reactor) is 5. How many people die because of oil, natural gas or coal each year?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
Ben
12 Nov 2011We can use power from volcanoes to provide evergy to about 25% of out country. There is a building in Stockholm that uses the heat energy from people walking around to power that builiding and 25% of the energy of a 2nd building.