BY RUSSELL TURNER
HOT AIR AND COMMON SENSE
A few days ago the alarm went off and I got out of bed to start another day. The temperature was in the teens outside, but it was cozy and warm in our house. I am far from being a rich man, but I do enjoy the modern conveniences we have all become accustomed to. Our parents and grandparents lived in a time when only the very rich had inside toilets and running water in their homes. I have noticed that today many Americans take those things for granted. We also take for granted countless electrical devices that add to our quality of life. It is a fact that all of the modern conveniences require our nation to have a dependable and inexpensive source of power. For many years our nation has relied upon coal to fuel the boilers that create electricity; sadly our current president and his administration have declared a war upon coal. Our president has used the Environmental Protection Agency as his henchman to do the dirty work to destroy our only abundant and dependable source of energy. Fortunately there has been a decision in the Supreme Court that will slow their agenda down.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently halted implementation of the Clean Power Plan, granting a stay sought by Oklahoma and more than two dozen other states. Instead of going through the proper channels, the administration and the EPA took it upon themselves to create rules, procedures and penalties for the release of carbon dioxide. While all of us want to have a clean environment, the standards they set would have required a major downgrade in the standard of living in this country. In addition to the lowering of our living standard, the cost would have risen drastically. I seriously doubt that very few Americans would be willing to go back to the Stone Age to satisfy the environmental nuts at the White House. While the act of halting the Clean Power Plan is not a complete victory, the stay will delay any action and we will have a new president before it gets resolved in the courts.
I feel that it is a good thing to do research on new sources of energy, but we need to understand that most of them are not ready for prime time yet. While the green energy people like to point to windmills and solar panels, those technologies aren’t anywhere close to producing the energy we need to run our nation and the world. The only reliable technology that could provide the power we need is nuclear, but as soon as you mention atomic power the same people will go ballistic. Others like to promote electric cars as the cure to pollution problems, but they have forgotten that the electricity has to come from somewhere. There are a lot of things such as hot air coming out of Washington DC, but common sense is not among those things.
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