Clean Energy Oxymoron
by Alan Caruba
Issue 135 - July 8, 2009

What does it take to be a dedicated environmentalist—a Green—these days? George Orwell’s “1984” describing “double think” in his allegory of Communism is a good place to begin.

• “The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
• “To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed.”
• “To deny objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.”

“Clean energy” is a good example. It is an oxymoron. Energy requires something less than cleanliness. Even wind and solar require machines, fuel and energy use in manufacturing, and lubrication to keep them operating, to say nothing about human sweat. With the introduction of the Waxman-Markey legislation, clean energy is touted as “a new direction for America’s future and fighting global warming.”

This is possibly the most dreadful piece of legislation to be put before Congress in the history of the nation. It is the deliberate reordering of American society because without adequate energy, the economy will implode and the lifestyles that Americans take for granted, all based on affordable electricity and fuel for transportation will cease to exist.

It is based entirely on the “global warming” lie. It is based entirely on the lie that carbon dioxide (CO²) is the driving force behind “climate change.”

Clean jobs are just one more of the endless myths that Greens invent in order to put an end to America’s capacity to compete in the global marketplace.

Clean energy is the term applied to wind and solar energy, deemed “renewable”, amidst more lies about the oil and coal which most surely will neither be renewable nor even available if Congress and the White House continue to put the national lands under which they exist off limits to all exploration and extraction.

Totally supported by government subsidies and mandates for their use, wind and solar energy represents barely one percent of the electricity Americans use every day.

Congress and President Obama likewise promise “Green jobs” based on wind and solar energy.

Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, recently pointed out that a study in Spain that was released in late March made clear that, “Spain has spent billions in taxpayer resources to subsidize renewable energy programs in an effort to jumpstart its ailing economy and what they have gotten in return are fewer jobs, skyrocketing debt and some of the highest and most regressive energy prices in the developed world.”

For every “Green job” created by the Spanish government over the past decade, 2.2 other jobs were destroyed as a result. To not expect the same result here is to be willfully ignorant.

In countless ways, the Greens are working to destroy America’s ability to have the energy it needs to survive and grow. Our economy, already suffering from government mandates that destroyed the nation’s housing market, will utterly collapse when it can no longer access the energy required for the future.

Clean energy is a dirty lie.

Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com and a weekly commentary at http://www.anxietycenter.com, the website of The National Anxiety Center.