Energy Policy Disinformation

Maybe some of you saw the College Dems with a kiosk in Trabant today. I did and stopped to pick up their flyer. It was all about Bush and how he is destroying the enviroment. While Republicans and Democrats may disagree on energy and enviromental policy, some of the Left's arguements are unfounded and simply hypocritical.

For example, the letter (if my scanner was working you'd be able to see it) chastizes Bush for subsidizing six new nuclear power plants. While I am impressed that they didn't go for a twofer by writing "nucular," it does point out a hypocrisy about nuclear power:

But, as Peter Huber and Mark Mills remind us in a book ("The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why we will Never Run out of Energy") considerably less self-indulgent than Miss Fonda's, the substitution has been outrageously wasteful. It takes four tons of coal to provide the power needs of one inhabitant of Chicago's Lake Shore Drive for a year. A few ounces of enriched uranium could cover the same need. There is also the damage to the environment. The central hypocrisy of the green movement in our era is that anti-nuclear policy has driven the US to use the hydrocarbon fuels so much opposed by the anti-global warming movement. Or, as Mr. Huber puts it: "If we had built all the plants that were in the pipeline at the time of Three Mile Island, we would have reduced current coal combustion sufficiently to satisfy the Kyoto treaty."

In pretty much the rest of it, they complain on two ends. They call for better cheaper energy and lament what they view as enviromental loss at the same time.

While both sides are searching for a way to meet energy needs, the Dems do not offer oppurtunity, just contradictory rhetoric.