Book retort

Submitted by admin on Sun, 01/15/2012 - 21:57

This comes under the heading of "not-new-but-worth-a-view"...interesting premise. At Global Warming.org:
 

In Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, Steve Milloy argues that environmentalists don’t want U.S. energy production to be clean or safe–they just don’t want energy production. They oppose it of all kinds, including renewable sources. In this passage, he shows how they obstruct traditional sources:

For the first time, applications to build new coal-fired power plants are being rejected based on their emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2)—and not just a few plants. Of more than 150 coal plant proposals submitted to regulators for approval in recent years, by the end of 2007 just thirty-five had either been built or were under construction. An astounding fifty-nine of the proposed plants were cancelled, abandoned, or put on hold because of concerns over CO2 emissions. Many coal plants are falling victim to aggressive legal challenges by the Sierra Club, whose “Stopping the Coal Rush” website sports a database and map proudly showing the various plants being attacked by green groups.Just over half our electricity is produced by coal. For decades, greens have tried in vain to reduce the use of coal, lobbying for regulations on how it is mined and the chemical compounds it emits when burned. But the global warming scare seems to have finally given them some traction.

And lawsuits aren’t the greens’ only weapon in this campaign, as they now insert themselves directly into big business deals. Incredibly, greens played a key role in the $45 billion buyout of the electric utility TXU Corp by a group of led by the private equity firm Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts in 2007. Prior to the buyout, TXU had angered greens by planning to build eleven new coal-fired power plants. So the KKR group reached out to the activists, who agreed to end their campaign against TXU and to support the buyout in exchange for KKR’s capitulation to two green demands: not building eight of the eleven plants, and having TXU support federal carbon-reduction legislation.

Burning natural gas, which accounts for 19 percent of our electricity, emits less carbon dioxide than burning coal, but that hasn’t earned it much support from the greens...

Read the rest.