Day: April 21, 2009

Greens: Waste not an energy solution

About a chicken manure-to-energy project in Dayton, VA, the director of the Chesapeake Climate Action network told the Washington Post that,

“It does not make sense to try to solve a waste problem as an energy solution. It is an unproven technology that is going to serve only to delay and confuse the real solutions in Virginia, which are energy efficiency and true renewable energy like wind and solar.”

Although the greens fret about chicken manure run-off to the Chesapeake Bay, they oppose a clean and sensible solution to that problem. This should come as no surprise since their real goal is to put Eastern Shore chicken farmers out of business.

NY Times: Less water for less development in Wyoming

The New York Times editorialized today in favor of depriving westerners of water in order to reduce development. From its editorial entitled “De-Watering Wyoming,” the Times wrote:

A developer named Aaron Million has proposed to build a private, 560-mile-long, 10-foot-high pipeline from Wyoming’s Green River Basin, along Interstate 80, and then south along Colorado’s Front Range to Denver and Colorado Springs. The pipeline is meant to carry water — more than 80 billion gallons a year. Last week, the Army Corps of Engineers presented the proposal in the town of Green River, Wyo., where it was met with outrage…

The path to sustainability for the Front Range is less development, not more.

Beware of environmentalists uttering “sustainability”; it’s green-speak for “no development.”

WSJ columnist: Make pick-up trucks too costly to own

In his Wall Street Journal column today entitled, “Can Small Cars Overcome Crash Fears?“, Joseph B. White suggests pricing trucks out of the range of people who want to own for non-work reasons:

The government should also require large pickup trucks to be substantially more efficient, which would also likely make them more expensive, Mr. Wenzel says. People who could prove they need a truck for work could get a tax break to offset the added cost, but not people who want to use a truck as a personal commuter vehicle, he says.

“If people want to use trucks as cars,” he says, they should be considered “a luxury item.”

No thanks, Mr. White. Safety is not a luxury item.

Dutch block Shell’s plan to bury CO2

Bloomberg reports,

The Dutch town of Barendrecht has a message for Royal Dutch Shell Plc: Not under my backyard.

The oil company and the Netherlands government intend to build the first of a new generation of carbon-dioxide storage facilities in two depleted natural-gas fields in Barendrecht. The plan is to capture emissions from a gasification hydrogen plant at Shell’s nearby Pernis refinery and then store the CO2 more than a mile below area homes, preventing the greenhouse gas from reaching the air and harming the environment.

“I don’t think this is the solution to the CO2 problem,” said 53-year-old resident Gerard van Gils. “Why do a project in a residential area and not offshore? The atomic bomb wasn’t tested under Manhattan. To me this means: Not under my backyard.”

Anyone who thinks we will ever be burying CO2 from coal-fired power plants — the only way to “safely” use coal according to Al Gore and Energy Secretary Steven Chu — is simply out-of-touch with the realities of NIMBY-ism stoked by the green anti-coal jihad.

French nuke company in trouble for spying on Greenpeace

The Financial Times reports today,

EDF, France’s nuclear energy operator, paid investigators to infiltrate the anti-nuclear movement around Europe, according to testimony given in a French judicial investigation.

The investigation is looking into whether the state-controlled group condoned illegal practices as part of a surveillance operation…

The work involved “a web watch, completed by on-the- ground work” that he described as “going to meetings, to demonstrations” and “taking the temperature of these organisations”.

But before the greens get all self-righteous about this, let’s review some recent Greenpeace criminality:

There shouldn’t be anything wrong with a nuclear power company simply gathering information about groups that pose very real threats to the security of its facilities.