If you drive east from Los Angeles on I-10 past San Bernadino, you soon come to a stretch of prime real estate with names like Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, and Indian Wells. Nestled between the Santa Rosa mountains and the high desert of Joshua Tree National Park, this is a valley of great natural beauty, not to mention the artificial splendor of over eighty golf courses whose fairways snake along some of the most opulent domiciles in the country.
But there is more. To the north runs the endless depression of the San Andreas Fault, a visual reminder of nature's potential for disaster. Next to it is the Colorado River Aqueduct that diverts liquid life from the border of Arizona to the Los Angeles basin. The Fault and the Aqueduct are not visible from I-10, but something else is. A forest. Not of oak or Ponderosa pine, but a forest nonetheless, one of arresting ugliness in my view: hundreds of windmills.
Say what you want about the desirability of renewable energy. For me, the despoliation of a magnificent landscape just isn't worth it, and especially not for such a miniscule return.
Dr.Chu, our Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary, is quite outspoken about our need to reduce our reliance on foreign oil by developing sources of renewable energy. He has no problem with prices at the pump rising to European levels of $8 or $9 a gallon, if this gets us to turn away from fossil fuels. Nor does he have a problem with the government handing out billions of dollars in taxpayer money to guaranteed failures like Solyndra. It's the Green Agenda at any cost. What a vision!
President Obama preaches the need for green energy because, he says, we consume 20% of the world's energy, but have only 2% of the world's oil reserves. I'm not sure he says that out of sheer ignorance or deceit. The fact is that the U.S. Geological Service has been telling us since April 2008 that we have more oil in the ground than all the Middle East oil producers put together. By Energy Information Administration estimates, the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana have over 500 BILLION barrels of oil only one thousand feet below the surface. And we now have the technology, called fracking, for getting it out.
You would think that the president would be encouraging the extraction from our rich oil fields. Instead, he has the EPA trying to stop it with unsustainable charges that fracking contaminates ground water. What he should be doing is making it possible to explore known deposits under public lands. On the contrary, he has opposed it, just as he has blocked offshore drilling in Alaska, the Gulf and off both coasts.
The good news is that unemployment in North Dakota is around 3%, fast food workers are making $20 an hour, and there aren't enough truck drivers to transport all that sweet crude coming out of the ground, which, by the way, costs about $16 a barrel.
But windmills are so pretty!
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