The greatest threat to US national security is not terrorism, Iran, or North Korea, but global overpopulation combined with our government's counterproductive interest in "renewable energy." The public has been misled into believing that renewable energy is a good thing, but the provable facts show just the opposite. Hobbits may be able to live poetically, generating energy from the wind, the sun, and the soil. The evidence shows that real human beings living in an industrialized civilization need highly concentrated nonrenewable energy to survive.
Renewable Energy Leads to Food Supply Collapse
Renewable energy schemes other than hydroelectric power take up too much land area and produce far too little energy to be of any economic value. Biofuels are the worst disaster of the 21st century, causing the starvation deaths of millions of people worldwide by displacing food production. Biofuel farming erodes topsoil, causes water pollution and water shortages, skyrockets the cost of fertilizer, and has accelerated global warning by increasing the release of greenhouse gases. Nitrogen fertilizers used to grow biofuel crops unleash large amounts of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas estimated to be 296 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Indonesia is now the third largest emitter of carbon dioxide, because burning down forests to grow biofuels releases their carbon content into the atmosphere. Liquid biofuels made from switchgrass, wood chips, or food products are so costly and inefficient to manufacture that they provide little, if any, net energy gain, and cellulosic ethanol is even more expensive to produce than corn ethanol. William Jaeger, an Oregon Science University agricultural economics professor who has studied biofuels extensively, spoke out against biofuel production to the Oregon State Legislature and stated that "Given currently available technologies it is difficult to see the net contribution of biofuels rising above 1% of our current fossil fuel energy consumption – for either Oregon or the U.S."
Wind power sounds like a good idea until you discover that to produce the energy output of just one automobile engine you need a Godzilla sized wind turbine that costs a small fortune and kills birds and bats by the thousands. Wind and sunlight are highly diffuse phenomena, so collecting their energy will always require monster sized artificial structures covering an impossibly large amount of land area to replace the concentrated energy content of fossil fuels. Wind power is a useful way to pump irrigation water, and solar panels are a responsible way to power a few light bulbs in a remote vacation cabin, but they are both terribly inefficient ways to power an entire nation. Humans need affordable, reliable power 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, not just when the wind blows and the sun shines. T. Boone Pickens claims that building wind turbines in America will create many "green jobs," but a study of Spain's energy program found that for every new job created by state funded wind power schemes, 2.2 jobs were lost due to higher energy costs, and each new wind power job cost almost $2,000,000. in government subsidies.
Advanced civilization demands the use of highly concentrated nonrenewable forms of energy. It is currently politically correct to condemn fossil fuels as evil, but if humans never used fossil fuels there would be no modern medicine, no efficient transportation system, no electronics or modern conveniences, and no large scale human food supply. In a fossil fuel free world we would be stuck in a primitive society based on subsistence farming, domestic animal grazing, hunting and fishing. That may sound like wholesome bucolic fun until you realize that the average human lifespan would be somewhere between 20 to 35 years, and the total world population would be a billion people at most.
The human food supply was built on highly concentrated fossil fuel energy and cannot be maintained and expanded as needed with weak and inefficient renewable energy schemes. It takes enormous amounts of energy to produce food, and in the largest sense one could say that food equals energy and energy equals food. The higher we pump up energy costs with renewable energy, the higher the price we pay for food. Food price inflation has caused climbing death rates around the world, and it is currently estimated that approximately 20,000 children die of malnutrition and related illness every day. The humane way to curb world population growth is to provide universal family planning education and financial incentives for people to have fewer children, not through the intentional starvation of the poor.
It is a mathematically provable fact that the only energy source that is big enough and concentrated enough to practically replace our vast fossil fuel energy reservoir is nuclear power, and carbon free nuclear energy is our only hope for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The United States Congress is planning to legislate high taxes on CO2 emissions, but if we do not have sufficient nuclear energy capacity to provide us with carbon free energy, such draconian tax schemes will collapse our economy. Instead of taxing already expensive energy and food, our leaders should reduce the red tape required to build nuclear power plants and limit lawsuits against power plant construction.
France relies heavily on nuclear power and has the cleanest air and lowest electricity rates in Europe. Denmark built over 6,000 expensive wind turbines as a minor supplement to its energy grid, and now has the highest electric rates in Europe, about double what the average American pays. Denmark has been unable to shut down a single fossil fuel power plant as a result of embracing wind power as they need inherently dirty coal burning power plants as backup when the wind stops blowing. France has significantly reduced its carbon emissions, but Denmark has only increased its greenhouse gas emissions, up 36% in 2006 alone. The Chair of Energy Policy in Denmark has branded wind power "a terribly expensive disaster." Solar power is even more expensive than wind power and you get absolutely no solar power at night.
You often hear unjustified scare stories about nuclear power, but it has a far better safety record than any fossil fuel and will not produce the kind of massive ecological and food supply destruction caused by biofuels, wind, and solar power schemes. Nuclear power is flexible and can be used to produce superior quality synthetic gasoline and jet fuel using carbon dioxide sucked right out of the atmosphere. Nuclear power can even be used to produce synthetic fertilizers, which currently require large amounts of natural gas to create.
Nuclear power is safe, reliable, carbon free, takes up very little space, and does not displace food production. There are no problem free energy sources, but all of the well known negatives of nuclear power can be addressed and corrected by responsible design and policies. We cannot make the sun shine 24 hours a day or the wind blow all of the time, so their diffuse and intermittent nature makes them a cost ineffective dead end investment. For information on 100% meltdown proof thorium powered nuclear reactors that do not produce long-lived radioactive waste or contribute to nuclear weapons proliferation, see:
http://thorium.50webs.com Geothermal energy is a valuable asset that may some day satisfy as much as 10% of our nation’s energy needs, but strictly speaking geothermal is not a renewable energy source because hot geothermal wells eventually run cold. The United States Government subsidizes wind power over 14 times as much as nuclear power, and over 93 times as much as the cleanest fossil fuel, natural gas. Environmentalist are blocking natural gas production, geothermal power plants, nuclear reactor construction, and even some wind power projects because of the visual and sound pollution created by legions of noisy, gargantuan wind turbines despoiling the landscape.
Obviously, the United States needs massive amounts of new energy to survive, so unless we adopt responsible energy polices that face facts honestly, the USA has no positive economic future. Our mathematically impossible attempts to replace the highly concentrated energy of fossil fuels with the inherently weak and diffuse energy of wind, solar, and biofuels will cripple our economy and lead to a dramatic, lethal shrinking of the human food supply.
For scientific details, see "The biofuel hoax is causing a world food crisis!" at:
http://biofuel.50webs.com
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