Governor Huntsman’s Californication with Arnold

The Utah Governor’s “Blue Ribbon Advisory Committee (BRAC) on Climate Change” wants to enact California-style legislation here in Utah, supposedly to combat “Global Warming,” which has been calculated to cost every household in the state about $32,000, but with no discernable improvement in the air quality what-so-ever. And who wants an electrical power system like California anyway? This very Labor Day the electrical distribution system in Southern California failed them and left them without air conditioning during a heat wave (see: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/weather/09/03/heat.wave.ap/index.html.) Plus I happen to have inside information that the only reason Southern California’s electrical transmission system didn’t melt down was because their distribution system went down first - it was the weakest link.

Further, the average residential rate in California is $0.14/kWh vs. the average in Utah which is $0.08/kWh vs. my co-op, Dixie Escalante, which is $0.05/kWh. So you can see why I’m so against adopting ANYTHING that California is doing in the field of electricity – they obviously don’t know what they’re doing. I am convinced that Governor Arnold is peddling his failed energy policies to Utah so that the whole state of Utah will also become un-competitive, so that California’s industries will stop migrating to Utah. The sad thing is that our naive governor has bought Arnold’s bill of goods, hook line and sinker. Of course no one on the Governor’s hand-picked Blue Ribbon Committee knows anything about the science of the issue – they’ve taken what they’ve been spoon-fed wholly on faith – the group is largely comprised of miscellaneous mayors or special interest group activists. The whole lot have based their fear and panic on a regurgitation of a summary of the UN-funded IPCC study that is terribly flawed and outright wrong (the “summary” was written by anti-American politicians and not by the scientists and does not accurately reflect the findings of the study at all) and so have decided to sacrifice 15% of our economy to this imaginary monster. What a bunch of morons – the politicians, I mean, not the special interest groups’ lobbyists – I’m impressed that these lobbyists seem to have convinced the politicians that man-made CO2 is affecting the climate and so need to buy their products. They must have hired that smooth-talking guy from the movie: Thank You For Smoking.

Anyway, I don’t claim to be an expert in climatology, but I am a licensed professional electrical engineer and have bothered to read a lot of background material on this subject, including the scientific chapters of UN study itself, three books (so far,) and a ton of related scientific studies that are freely available on the internet. Of course, the science is practically superfluous in this case since the BRAC is loaded (17 out of 20) with members who have already decided that their mission in life is to subsidize the solar panel and windmill industry by doubling everyone’s electricity bills, so we definitely have an uphill battle ahead of us. I guess we’ll see what happens.

Stabbing Mother Earth in the Back

Back in the 70’s when I was a kid growing up in Lukachukai, Arizona, in the very heart of the Navajo Reservation, my Navajo classmates (in their more militant moments) would criticize the white man’s agriculture processes. They would say that to plow the ground was to stab Mother Earth in the back. Even as a kid I knew that that notion was ridiculous – totally lacking in scale. Even back then I knew that a plow in the ground was no more than combing the hair of Mother Earth, and I said as much to my unreceptive classmates. Now that we’re in the 21st century nearly 40 years later, and with the power of the internet, I can put a pencil to this problem: a simple on-line search quickly finds that the earth has a diameter of 7926 miles (at the equator), or 41,849,280 feet; a plow is 8 to 12 inches long, so call it one foot, which means that the plow is only penetrating 0.0000024% of Mother Earth’s back – really just a very light back scratch.

Now fast forward to 2007: as an adult I see the same ignorance of scale of the earth and its atmosphere among the politicians and media of the developed world, including the United States. These poor uninformed alarmists think that our manmade CO2 emissions are affecting our climate – maybe they’re confused by the thick smog that they can see in their cities, largely emanating from automobiles’ unfiltered exhaust pipes, as opposed to the invisible and harmless breath that we all exhale. Either way, they certainly don’t understand anything about the relative scale involved when discussing CO2 and the atmosphere. The earth’s atmosphere, which by the way is what distinguishes God’s Green Earth from uninhabitable Mars, is primarily made up of Nitrogen (78%), Oxygen (21%), and Argon (1%.) CO2, the next most common gas, makes up only 0.038% of the atmosphere. Of that, man has contributed about 3%. Hmm… 3% of 0.038% - that sounds a lot like your chances of winning the lottery – essentially zero. Anyway, the rest of the CO2 in the atmosphere (97%) comes from natural sources, primarily that big mass of water that we call the ocean, which releases CO2 when it heats up and absorbs it back when it cools. So, even if we were to reduce mankind’s CO2 emissions to zero, which would require the elimination of all electricity production, transportation, and even our collective exhalations, we still would not be able to affect the earth’s temperature that one measly degree over the course of the next century for which the religion of Global Warming is renting their garments.

All of which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be good stewards of Mother Earth – we absolutely should. Genesis 1:26 tells us: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth…” I believe that when God gave Man dominion “over all the earth” he also gave us the obligation to be responsible stewards, and we still have that responsibility today. I believe that we should maximize the use of our natural resources and keep our environment clean. We did the right thing when we eliminated the real pollutants, SO2 (smog) and NOx, from the electric power generation process here in America – good for us. And by the way, producing harmless CO2 rather than SO2 as an output of generating electricity only shows how efficient and clean our generation process has really gotten. I’m also glad we switched to unleaded gasoline and required catalytic converters on our cars here in America – we all breathe easier because of it. During the 70’s we all “pitched in” and picked up the trash along our highways, making them look decent again. It was the right thing to do. You only have to look at horrific quality of the environment in China, India, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, or Latin America to really appreciate how much we’ve improved the environment in the United States of America since I was a kid the 60’s.

So with all of these huge strides in fixing our environment, why is it that we’re paying any attention to the well funded and very vocal cabal of politicians and media that want to steal our time and money and throw them to the manufacturers of windmills and solar panels under the guise of solving a non-existent problem? How stupid are we? Especially when we have REAL problems that require our time and money. For example, why are NONE of the politicians or media trying to solve our crippling debt problem? How is it possible that in the space of my lifetime we’ve gone from being the world’s biggest creditor to the world’s biggest debtor? How long will it be before China cuts off our allowance and leaves us to stew in the sweltering dark like California on Labor Day? How about we devote a little time and money to our debt problem?! Debt reduction may not be as sexy as Global Warming, but it has real tangible benefits and consequences.