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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (10197)	10/1/2003 6:04:50 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793731

New Republic Blog: ....Republican leaders just dropped the "Renewable Portfolio Standard" from the energy bill, and Democrats are claiming an outrage. But the standard isn’t practical. As proposed, the rule would require large electric utilities to generate at least 10 percent of their power from green sources--wind, solar, biomass--by the year 2019. The problem is that such sources today account for only about 1 percent of electricity production. So suppose green power is really successful, and doubles its share of the market. That's still only two percent. Going from 1 percent to 10 percent in less than two decades is possible on a technical basis, but would require a vast capital investment; would be the biggest public-works project in a generation, which is something backers of the Renewable Portfolio Standard tend to slide past in a glissando. Going from 1 percent to 10 percent would require building vast numbers of gigantic windmill farms, which are fine sources of green power, but which dominate landscapes and kill birds. A NIMBY movement is arising to oppose wind power--or at least, to demand that it be put somewhere else. Enviros who worked to start the NIMBY movement will soon find it backfires on them by opposing wind generation of electricity. Any large increase in the share of United States electricity that is generated from non-polluting, greenhouse-free sources would require a new commitment to building atomic power stations and hydropower. Democrats, enviros, and NIMBYs flee in horror from atomic power, though it is the safest source of electricity generation ever devised. (In the United States, no one from the general public has ever been killed by an atomic power plant; hundreds of workers die annually in coal-mining and gas-drilling accidents, plus in accidents at fossil-fired power plants, while deaths in uranium mining and worker accidents at atomic power plants annually are in the single digits.) Democrats and enviros detest hydropower dams as well. Rule out hydro and nuclear, and you've consigned your energy policy to slow growth on nonpolluting power. This is why, while Republicans may be fossil-foolish, Democrats are engaged in demagoguery over the Renewable Portfolio Standard. The rule just wouldn't work as written, and Democrats know this perfectly well. Their version of the rule would exempt municipal-owned power producers, almost all of whom are in the Democratic Northeast, or in Democratic California. So if Democrats had their way, the new standard would apply to private power companies in red states, but not to public power companies in blue states. This is egregious political double standards. A more modest goal for pollution-free power--say, adding one percent in the coming decade, and two percent in the next--might be practical. But Republican leadership might go for that deal, and therefore Democrats have demanded something impractical, exactly so that the provision can fail and the president and his party be denounced..... tnr.com