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To the editor:

Wednesday’s guest column was so sadly devoid of factual information as to be pathetically delusional.  Specifically, the key sentence: “we have shifted from relying primarily on fossil burning power plants to a thriving clean energy industry that supplies renewable low-cost electricity” is demonstrably false!  Coal and natural gas supply approximately 63% of our country’s electricity while hydro and nuclear supply most of the remaining 37%.

Furthermore, besides wasting enormous amounts of land, harnessing breezes and sunshine requires upsetting millions of tons of rock overburden in order to crush and process tons of ore to produce steel, copper, aluminum, rare earths, and other commodities needed to fabricate components such as 274-feet-long, petroleum-based, non-recyclable windmill blades.  None of this activity is “clean” or “renewable”!

As explained in a January 9, 2020 issue of American Thinker, each stage of mining, fabrication, and attendant transportation requires use of hydrocarbons (coal, oil, and natural gas) leaving a trail of devastation and depredation: habitat destroyed, water contaminated, toxic waste, and slave labor to name a few.   And as to “low-cost electricity”, why would anyone voluntarily wish to emulate electricity price increases of from 18% to 33% being experienced by residents of North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, states that have been captured by environmental predators, parasitic lobbyists, climate change alarmists, and crony capitalists (but I repeat myself) demanding erection of enormous numbers of global warming scarecrows and solar junkyards?

Little of this massive environmental waste, coupled with waste of national treasure, would happen in the absence of lavish government subsidies and tax write-offs of many kinds, corporate welfare as addictive as heroin, especially pernicious during a time when prices for coal and natural gas have declined!   Clearly, if wind and solar activity made any sense, the market would support them without need for subsidies, tax write-offs, and governmental mandates.  Furthermore, little of this extremely expensive wind and solar waste would be possible without plentiful, inexpensive, and reliable energy from hydrocarbons.  For example, concrete that anchors to Earth all these hundreds of feet tall monstrosities would not be available were it not for cement produced by hydrocarbons.

Unfortunately your guest author appears to have been a victim of failed government schools that, for decades starting in kindergarten, have been indoctrinating children in myths concerning global warming, carbon dioxide, and natural climate change, myths that have generated so-called “renewable” busy work.

Charitable readers will wonder how someone can claim to care about energy and the environment without taking time necessary to learn something factual about these topics.

M. S. Medeiros, Jr.

Kitty Hawk

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