GOP Senator Believes Renewable Energy Not Enough
GOP Senator John Barrasso from Wyoming says that Alternative Energy won’t meet US needs and only increase the price of energy along with possibly increasing our dependency on foreign oil. In the GOP’s weekly Internet address, Senator John Barrassso said that renewable energy alone cannot solve America’s long term energy needs. The GOP believes that America needs to expand it’s funding for all types of energy sources including U.S. oil and clean coal. Below is the entire address made this past weekend:
Throughout the speech, he does continually say that he does support alternative energy and expanding upon it. That is great that he supports alternative energy, but why still support all these other horrible energy sources just so we can say that we support America. Isn’t using renewable energy also supporting America by providing tons of jobs to Americans and producing energy within America? It just seems like politicians feel that the only way keep our energy prices low is to continue to support researching “clean coal”, getting our energy from oil in Alaska or extracting oil shale. I don’t care how much research is done to make them cleaner, oil and coal are dirty energy sources.
One way that we can stop “discriminating” against other energy sources is to start research all types of renewable energy. What about geothermal, biomass and water just to name a few? At the moment we are in a difficult situation because much of our energy comes from coal and oil. Currently, renewable energy only accounts for 1% of our total energy usage. Let’s hope that we can continue expand our energy portfolio with renewable sources and make that percentage much larger.
Comments
“It just seems like politicians feel that the only way keep our energy prices low is … getting our energy from oil in Alaska”
I have always been against the whole “Drill baby Drill” initiative in Alaska. I think it is very short sited and doesn’t really address the real issue of energy independence.
In many regards, I think if our oil prices had stayed high last year, we would be seeing a much larger push towards alternative energy and energy conservation.
I, for one, thinks he’s partially right and completely misses the point at the same time.
I do think it will be a very difficult undertaking to meet the future US power need projections with only renewable energy – maybe even impossible.
The point, however, is that with proper focus on energy conservation, the future US power needs won’t be as high as they’re projected to be.
Which would make a gradual, but rapid phasing in of renewable sources a viable solution.
There isn’t really a choice in this matter, in my opinion. Extracting Alaskan oil, oil shale and the pipe dream “clean” coal will only postpone the inevitable. Sooner or later, US citizens (and the rest of the world) will have to adjust to what’s available through renewable means. The real choice is whether we mess up the atmosphere even more before we bite the bullet and do what’s necessary or behave responsibly rightaway.
We can not rely solely in the power of oil. We need to develop alternative sources of energy, then energy prices will drop.