Just when you think they can't get any worse...

Word is reaching us, mostly through Crook and Liars, that while these two geniuses are all for drilling for oil any where and every where their pals in the oil companies want to drill they are concerned about the effects of producing solar energy on federal lands. They are so concerned in fact that they have placed a moratorium on any solar power production on federally owned land in western states, which means that for two years no solar energy will be produced on lands out west that are owned by the feds. But during that time they'll be allowing their pals in big oil to drill off the coast, on most federal lands, and in your backyard if they want to.

I'm wondering if they hate solar power so much because Bush McCain has had so many bouts of melanoma or because it's a cheap form of energy that can't be controlled by big business. Hmmmmm, now that I think about it, I'll go with the second one.

The supply of all fossil fuels is finite, some day we will run out of them. That's a fact. As much as they want to believe that their god or his son is going to fly down and stick more oil and coal in the ground they are mistaken. We're using it up and one day it will all be gone.

But thank goodness that we have the sun and the wind. The sun will last us for about 4 or 5 billion more years and as long as the world keeps turning the wind will blow. From these two inexhaustible sources we can derive more than enough power to make us kick our addiction to messy dirty climate changing fossil fuels. Countries like Spain, Germany, and even Sweden derive a major portion of their power from the sun and the wind and the only thing stopping us from doing so is our lack of political.

We've let a few multi millionaires in big oil and big coal dictate our energy policy for years, especially the last 7 years, and what has made them rich has been a colossal fuck up for the rest of us. Pollution from big coal burning power plants kills people, mountain top removal coal mining kills our mountains and our land, all the gas and oil we burn up is causing our our planet to heat up which will, if we don't stop it soon, make our planet uninhabitable for humans. The reason we stay addicted to fossil fuels is because our government is owned by the corporations who benefit from us using gas, oil, and coal. And those same corporations own the media as well so they feed the sheep a constant stream of lies that tell them that anyone who wants to use solar and wind power are "kooks" who hate business and the USA.

If we broke our addiction to foreign oil and we produced more energy from solar and wind then we'd be far less exposed to terrorism and more Americans would benefit from all the jobs that the conversion to solar and wind energy would generate. Some jobs would be lost, many of those jobs would be white collar jobs in the oil and coal industry so really there'd be not much harm done there, but millions of other jobs would be created. And they'd be blue collar jobs that could not be outsourced, the kinds of jobs that helped build the middle class after the Depression.

They claim that solar energy is too expensive up front and that's why they haven't gone into it full bore yet. But when you figure in the true cost of the damage coal mining in all it's forms does to the planet and the damage that coal fired electric power plants do to the environment then the "high cost" of solar is not high at all. The savings from not having to treat respiratory illnesses due to air pollution from coal fired plants alone would off set the up front "high cost" of solar power.

They like to claim that wind turbines will kill all sorts of birds and insects and again their claims are nothing more than a smoke screen for their shortsightedness. Wind turbines that produce the kind of energy that's needed to power a good chunk of homes and businesses have huge blades. And these blades are big enough that most birds will instinctively fly around them. Will some birds fly into the blades? Yes, some birds will. But just like birds adapted to flying around buildings that were built in their migratory paths in the early days of the industrial revolution, birds of today and birds of the future will evolve to the point where they do not fly into the blades of wind turbines.

We've been talking about doing something about getting off oil and coal since I was in grade school in the late '60's and early '70's. It's time we stopped letting people in big business tell us that we can't shed our addiction to their products. It's time we stopped letting big business set an energy agenda that is killing us and our planet. And it's time we started to demand that government land be used to generate solar and wind power instead of being drilled on and mined to death.