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发帖数: 29846 | 1 The Chinese government dealt the public relations strategy of green
technology advocates in the Obama administration a blow last month when
Premier Wen Jiabao announced that the state-run economy would stop expanding
its wind and solar industries, choosing instead to focus on nuclear,
hydroelectric and shale — or fracking — as the energies of the future.
“It is getting tougher and tougher for the Obama administration to argue
that somehow we’re in this big race for green power worldwide when the rest
of the world seems to have decided that the race isn’t worth winning,”
Daniel Kish, the senior vice president for policy at the Institute for
Energy Research, told The Daily Caller.
President Barack Obama, whose administration has held up solar and wind
energy while stunting shale and snubbing hydroelectric, has deployed
nationalist lingo, holding the specter of global Chinese green technology
dominance as a driving motivation behind the administration’s expensive and
embattled green energy subsidy programs. In his 2012 State of the Union
address, Obama said, “I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry
to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here.”
By halting wind and solar industry expansion, Kish told TheDC, “China’s
just doing what every other country in the world other than the United
States is doing. Years back, the president used Spain as an example [of
green energy competition] … then Germany, then China.”
Spain’s green energy subsidies were found to have a cost of 2.2 jobs for
every one created; and in Germany, the government announced this year that
it is scaling back its subsidies. “It’s too damn expensive,” Kish
explained, “and someone’s got to pay for it.”
Regardless of American and European drives, in China the focus has always
been on hydroelectric and nuclear energy, with just a bone thrown to wind
and solar — though that bone has been heavily-publicized by the Chinese
government’s newspaper, China Daily, which is distributed for free in
Washington.
Currently, the Chinese government has 14 nuclear power plants, with 25 more
under construction. Although the Obama administration has allowed
construction to begin on a two nuclear plants, it stopped completion of the
Yucca Mountain depository that was intended to store nuclear waste. The
administration has yet to propose an alternative.
Though nearly $15 billion had been spent to opening the facility, which had
promised to solve the disposal problems of states across the country, Sen.
Majority Leader Harry Reid teamed up with the administration to halt the
plan and ensure that “Congress will not appropriate a single [further] dime
” to the project, leaving America’s spent nuclear fuel storage system
effectively suspended.
And the plants the U.S. does operate are old — in a 2012 article, The New
York Times reported that, “Of the 104 plants now operating, ground was
broken on all of them in 1974 or earlier.”
China is also the largest producer of hydroelectric power on the planet. In
2010, approximately 17 percent of the domestic electricity they used came
from hydro, and their plans to expand by 2015 are “equivalent to building
about seven more dams the size of China’s Three Gorges Dam, currently the
largest in the world,” according to the Worldwatch Institute.
In addition to its green energy, China consumes approximately four times the
amount of coal as the United States annually, and is building a coal plant
every week. Meanwhile, on March 28, the president’s Environmental
Protection Agency released strict new carbon dioxide rules that, The
Washington Post reported, “could end the construction of conventional coal-
fired facilities in the United States.” (RELATED: Renewable energy mandates
take a slice of the ‘pie’ in small town Colorado)
Finally, in his 2012 State of the Union address, the president also touted
shale — or fracking — as an energy technology the government was
instrumental in developing and supporting. And while the Switzerland-based
World Economic Forum reported that nearly 10 percent of new jobs created in
the United States in 2011 were created by the oil and gas industries,
federal regulations have effectively prevented any natural gas exploration
from taking place on federally owned lands.
While companies have successfully drilled state and private lands, the
federal government has pursued the idea of forcing companies to get a permit
to drill and, once that is complete, a permit to commence fracking —
effectively doubling the difficulty of the already expensive process and
leaving it economically untenable.
“Basically,” Kish said, “the only reason China was making solar panels
and wind mills was to sell them to western countries that impose this kind
of electricity on their people … through renewable energy standards and
clean energy standards.”
“If were stupid enough to buy electricity and solar panels and windmills
that China can make cheaper than we can, and deploy them here in the United
States so that all of the goods here in the United States will be more
expensive than China can make them,” Kish concluded, “well, that’s like
selling us opium, right?” |
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