Are your Solar Panels Breeding Bolsheviks? Tea Party Congress targets National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL)
June 5, 2011
The Tea Party congress hates new energy, hates the idea that the nation could be weaned off its oil dependence, or fossil fuels. They hate renewable energy because their primary sponsors in the fossil fuel industry want above all to slow progress on that front, and drag the nation back into the 19th century.
We’ve seen a number of examples of this over recent months, now the anti-science crusade continues. Lead by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO), 9 members of congress have now asked for the closure of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO.
The lawmakers ask that funding in the 2012 budget be eliminated for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy programs because they “have failed to live up to their supposed potential.”
Democratic U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, who represents the district in which the national lab is located, has said the facility generates 5,500 jobs.
“NREL is a crown jewel in the world of renewable energy,” said Les lie Oliver, a spokeswoman for Perlmutter. “It’s providing a lot of jobs; those are things we need to be fostering.”
According to an analysis by the University of Colorado, the lab provides a $714 million annual boost to the state’s economy.
The letter, written by California U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock IR-CA), says: “We should not follow the president’s poor planning in increasing the funding for these anti-energy boondoggles.”
By “boondoggle”, apparently he means wind energy, which has made up more than a third of new US capacity over the last several years, and is currently coming in competitive with, or cheaper than, coal in most areas of the country, or solar energy, which is now the fastest growing industry in the US.
Below the fold, American Wind Energy Association President Denise Bode kicks ass and takes names as Fox News “personalities” try to spread more disinformation about renewable energy.
Rep. Lanborn is following a script similar to Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who recently wrote that support for “so-called clean energy” is “not good for the United States.”
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
June 5, 2011 at 9:09 pm
Typo – the extra space in “a spokeswoman for Perl mutter”. This threw me for a minute, as I have spent most of the afternoon wrestling with Perl scripting 🙂
June 5, 2011 at 10:48 pm
got it. sorry to throw you.
June 5, 2011 at 11:09 pm
The PERL script running in Varney’s brain doesn’t behave like it’s accepting input parameters.
June 5, 2011 at 11:18 pm
It’s getting more bizarre in right wing Tea Party land.
When will they ever learn… I doubt it.
But many thanks for the article again, Peter.
Kudos to you keeping up the good work.
June 6, 2011 at 12:15 am
[…] is the original post: Are your Solar Panels Breeding Bolsheviks? Tea Party Congress … Uncategorized breeding, breeding-bolsheviks, congress-hates, energy, hates-the-idea, nation, […]
June 6, 2011 at 2:30 pm
> …Denise Bode kicks ass and takes names…
I come for the information. I stay for the chuckles.
🙂
June 6, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Love the poster as well.
Maybe the next one could have the hammer and sickle on the side of a wind turbine?
June 6, 2011 at 3:44 pm
The Tea Party and GOP are hell bent on making sure that the U.S. loses out, in the worldwide clean energy revolution.
China now has 45 GW of wind power and is on track to have 200 GW by 2020.
China will spend $454 billion in the next five years supporting renewable energy. There is a city in China where over 800,000 people are employed in the solar energy industry.
Germany now has 17% renewable energy, with some northern provinces at 40% wind energy.
Denmark has 20% wind energy. Spain and Italy have large percentages of wind and solar energy.
Solar thermal power plants were developed largely by the National Renewable Energy Lab.
Solar thermal power plants, also called concentrating solar power (CSP) can be built with molten salt heat storage. This turns them into base load power plants, providing steady power day and night. They can also follow the demand load. The first plant with molten salt heat storage is being built in Arizona, with 6 hours heat storage.
If an area of our southwest 41.5 x 41.5 miles was filled with solar thermal with heat storage, it could produce as many megawatt hours of electricity as all the coal plants in America. That’s about twice the size of the area now evacuated around the Fukishima nuclear plant in Japan.
Arizona alone has 285 GW potential for solar thermal, or the equivalent of about 120 nuclear power plants, adjusting for the lower capacity factor for the solar, verses nuclear.
Darrel Issa
Tom McClintock (R-CA)
Sen Inhofe (R-OKlahoma)
Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)
John Doolittle
Robert Walker
Joe Barton (R-TX)
Fred Upton (R- MN)
Rep. Ed Whitfield (R – Kentucky)
Rep. John Shimkus (R-Illinois),
Rep. Colin Peterson (R-MN)
Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-MN)
Rand Paul (R- Kentucky)
This is a partial list of the most anti science members of the Senate and Congress. None of them have any business being legislators.
What we have is collective insanity. Either that or it’s collective ignorance or dishonesty.
While scientists worldwide are nearly unanimous in agreement on AGW, the GOP is almost unanimous in denial of the science. Every scientific organizaton in the world with any standing agrees with the IPCC.
Only two such organizations disagree with the IPCC
The American Association of Petroleum Geologists
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Geologists
That’s the whole list.
June 6, 2011 at 3:47 pm
And here is the list of professional scientific organizations that endorse the findings of the IPCC.
National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)
NASA
Woods Hole Resesarch Center
US Geological Survey (USGS)
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)
American Association of State Climatologists
Federal Climate Change Science Program, 2006 (the study authorized by the Bush administration, and then Edited by a Petroleum Institute lawyer under the Bush administration to water it down)
American Chemical Society – (world’s largest scientific organization with over 155,000 members)
Geological Society of America
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
American Association of State Climatologists
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
American Astronomical Society
American Institute of Physics
American Meteorological Society (AMS)
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Stratigraphy Commission – Geological Society of London – (The world’s oldest and the United Kingdom’s largest geoscience organization)
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Royal Society, United Kingdom
Russian Academy of Sciences
Royal Society of Canada
Science Council of Japan
Australian Academy of Sciences
Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts
Brazilian Academy of Sciences
Caribbean Academy of Sciences
French Academy of Sciences
German Academy of Natural Scientists
Indian National Science Academy
Indonesian Academy of Sciences
Royal Irish Academy
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italy)
Academy of Sciences Malaysia
Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Union of Concerned Scientists
The Institution of Engineers Australia
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS)
National Research Council
Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospherice Sciences
World Meteorological Organization
State of the Canadian Cryosphere (SOCC)
International Council on Science
American Physical Society (APS)
Australian Institute of Physics (AIP
European Physical Society
European Science Foundation
Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS
Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN)
Network of African Science Academies
International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences (CAETS
European Academy of Sciences and Arts
InterAcademy Council (IAC)
International Arctic Science Committee
Arctic Council
European Federation of Geologists (EFG)
European Geosciences Union (EGU)
Geological Society of Australia
International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics
National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT
Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Royal Meteorological Society (UK)
American Quaternary Association (AMQUA
American Institute of Biological Sciences
American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians (AAWV
American Society for Microbiology
Institute of Biology (UK)
Society of American Foresters (SAF
Deniers would have you believe that somehow all these organizations and the thousands of scientists from 120 countries, who have been doing the research for 20 years, and over 30 years for some, are all scamming you in some dark conspiracy. Wow, and they call the scientists alarmists!
Recall or vote out the anti science deniers.
June 6, 2011 at 4:01 pm
thanks for that list!
June 6, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Fossil fuels in the U.S. receive twice as much in subsidies and tax credits as all renewables combined. A large percentage of the help for renewables goes to corn based ethanol, which is loved only by big corporate agribusiness interests.
Oil has been subsidized since 1918 nonstop.
Coal has been subsidized since 1932 nonstop.
The CEO of General Electric recently said that photovoltaic solar will be competitive with fossil fuels in 3-5 years. GE is about to enter the PV solar industry in a big way.
Wind power is already competitive.
Solar is already competitive in sunny and higher priced energy markets.
OUT with the science morons. Enough with the congressional witch hunts against climate scientists. We had enough of that kind of nonsense in the Scopes MonkeyTrial many decades ago.
June 6, 2011 at 4:56 pm
anyone that has figures on how much in subsidies coal receives, let me know.
June 6, 2011 at 7:27 pm
Not all specifically coal, but these might help:
* US Energy Subsidy Scorecard: oil + gas took 60% of $725 billion in federal assistance between 1950 and 2003. Coal 13%. Hydroelectric 11%. Nuclear 9% – not counting liability cap subsidy which is impossible to quantify. Wind, solar, geothermal, and bio-fuels together got only 6%. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/11/the-federal-energy-subsidy-scorecard-how-renewables-stack-up + http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/blogs/republican/energy-subsidies-0312
* From 1943 to 1999 the U.S. government paid nearly $151 billion, in 1999 dollars, in subsidies for wind, solar and nuclear power, Marshall Goldberg of the Renewable Energy Policy Project, a research organization in Washington, wrote in a July 2000 report. Of this total, 96.3 percent went to nuclear power. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/business/global/27iht-renuke.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
* IEA reveals global fossil fuel subsidies top $557 billion. http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2010/06/07/the-cost-of-fossil-fuel-subsidies-557bn/
* Subsidies to fossil fuels – a mature, developed industry that has enjoyed government support for many years – totaled approximately $72 billion over the study period, representing a direct cost to taxpayers. Subsidies for renewable fuels, a relatively young and developing industry, totaled $29 billion over the same period. http://www.eli.org/Program_Areas/innovation_governance_energy.cfm
Bonus:
* Clean energy lobby dwarfed by billion dollar fossil fuel spending in Washington. “…the traditional fossil fuel sector has spent more than twenty-times the money the clean energy sector has when it comes to influencing federal laws and regulations.” http://www.energyboom.com/policy/clean-energy-lobby-dwarfed-billion-dollar-fossil-fuel-expenditures-washington
* Top 25 U.S. Energy Lobbyists of 2010. Utilities = $150 million; Oil & Gas = $112 million; Renewables = $40 million. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/12/top-25-u-s-energy-lobbyists-of-2010?cmpid=rss
June 11, 2011 at 8:02 am
[…] […]
December 9, 2011 at 1:07 am
[…] Â You can’t stop an idea whose time has come – much to the chagrin of the renewable-hating tea party congress. […]