Progressive Democrat Issue 107: ENERGY POLICY

I don't pay much attention to CNN these days because, well, they have sucked for awhile. Their news is generally too superficial and has gotten the messy blood spatter of right wing bias from Fox News's murder of good journalism.

But occasionally something catches my eye. My take on alternative energy is that we have to start somewhere and sometime and right here in America and right now is as good as any place to start. I make no claims as to how fast or completely we can switch to clean and safe alternatives to oil and coal. But the combination of a need for good manufacturaing jobs, the fact that wind turbines are proving to be a real boon to farmers, and the need to cut emissions of all sorts make a strong arguement to develop alternative energy, particularly wind since we have had the technology for more than 10 years to generate a fair amount of energy from wind in a cost effective manner. Essentially, wind power is cheaper than clean-burning coal.

But now I hear some are more ambitious than I am regarding alternative energy and are aiming to put their ambition into practice. Unfortunately the initiative and manufacturing isn't coming from America!From CNN Money.com:

Carbon dioxide makes up nearly 80 percent of all greenhouse gases. More than a quarter of that CO2 comes from electrical power plants. That's why replacing plants that run on fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas with renewable power sources, even nukes, has emerged as a major plank in the campaign against global warming.

The effort is heightened in Europe because the continent relies on fuel imports from Russia and the Middle East for 50 percent of its energy, and a recent projection shows that portion increasing to 70 percent by 2025...

In May, Dublin-based Airtricity, the world's fastest-growing wind developer, announced plans for a European supergrid - a network of 2,000 offshore wind turbines in the North Atlantic.

The grid would initially supply 10,000 megawatts to 8 million homes. Ultimately, Airtricity envisions a wind grid stretching from Spain to Sweden, with an output equal to that of 30 nuclear reactors. The supergrid wouldn't eliminate the CO2 thrown off by Europe's power plants, but it would reduce it by 60 million tons per year - the equivalent of taking 15 million cars off the road.

The payoff: Founded just seven years ago, Airtricity is on track to bring in $657 million in annual revenue by 2010. The company currently operates 16 wind farms in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, and its five-year project timeline will ramp it up to a potential 7,000 megawatts in capacity, equal to the output of 14 U.S. coal plants.

Good for Dublin. Now let's see if we can be as ambitious and imaginative right here in, say, Detroit or Pittsburgh or... I mean why isn't AMERICA taking the initiative? Have we slipped so far that we can't take the lead? Has Bush weakened our spirit so much we can let Dublin take the lead in wind energy? And for the record, the current lead is held by Denmark.

Write the media and your Congress Critters saying you want America to start taking the lead again by restarting our manufacturing base in our heartland to be the supplier to the world of alternative energy technology and that you want to see America, the nation with the most diverse energy resources in the world, to start becoming energy independent using LOCAL solutions that create LOCAL jobs.

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