Rasoul, Dems fuel up dream

The News Virginian
Published: August 6, 2008

Feeling in their campaign backsides the sting of constituents’ ire over energy, Democrats are expending theirs in pursuit of what Sixth District congressional candidate Sam Rasoul refers to as a renewable revolution. The challenger to eight-term incumbent Republican Bob Goodlatte, Rasoul likens this prospective turnabout to the 1960s space race, declaring, “If we can put a man on the moon in less than a decade, we can become energy independent in the same time.” So there.
Facts are accursed things, particularly if one ignores them, conveniently. And the principal fact is this: Renewable energy will not supplant fossil fuels within 10 years, nor will it within 20. Al Gore cannot speak otherwise and have it be so. Nor can the antecedent in Rasoul’s hypothetical proposition guarantee the consequent. The world shall sooner put a man in the moon than it will rely exclusively on renewables.
Nonetheless, Rasoul and others of his kind thrive on false inference.
“We understand that because cheap oil is not part of our future, we must move toward energy efficiency and the production of renewable energies of various sorts: wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, tidal,” Rasoul writes in his energy platform. “The key word,” he adds, providing italics for emphasis, “is production. Already we have created the technology for alternative energy but left the production to other countries.”
So the United States, in its dogged adherence to burning fossil fuels, presumably lags behind the world in the renewables race. Well, not exactly.
The global capacity for renewable power, excluding large hydro, was 240 gigawatts last year, or less than 6 percent of total capacity. America relied on renewables for less than 7 percent of its energy last year. The U.S. used less wind but more sun. Wind made up less than 3 percent of the world power share but two thirds of 1 percent domestically.
Rasoul and the one he echoes, higher Democratic power Barack Obama, are undaunted.
Obama wants to spend $150 billion over 10 years on renewables. The presumptive presidential nominee apparently presumes this investment will be more fruitful than it was in the case of the $100 billion poured into renewables worldwide last year. That money helped increase renewables’ share of capacity, indicating most acutely how little renewables contributed before.
Alternative energy sources touted by Democrats and their environmental constituency almost invariably present the same problem: They require vast expanses of land.
Environmentalists despair land consumption for, among other things, sprawl, electric transmission lines and agriculture’s ravaging of the Earth, but not the prospect of thousands of square miles layered in solar panels and wind towers. What to do with the people? Well, fewer of them would mean less energy consumption. What of the animals whose habitat must give way to another bumper ethanol crop? Well, at least no one is drilling.
Rasoul’s opponent has a better idea. Goodlatte has proposed a bill that would allow Virginia’s governor to petition the Department of Interior for a waiver on the federal ban on oil exploration on the Outer Continental Shelf off the state’s coast. Goodlatte also has been a steady proponent of drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Opponents of that option, banned under the Clinton administration more than a decade ago, argue that the benefits would be too small and would take too long to realize. That rationale, of course, is selectively applied.
More problematic is that Rasoul and Obama would have Americans pay millions of additional tax dollars to pursue Gore’s illusion. To the dreamers, we say fantasize so much as you like, but do so at your own expense.