LETTERS: Writer disagrees with Bennett
To the Editor:
Enclosed is an essay in response to the letter to the editor by Harry Bennett titled, "Don't sell out to coal mine owners." It sounds like Bennett is leading the state of Kansas into the same disastrous situation that the state of California is in. There are a number of facts that Bennett is apparently not aware of. They are:
1.) New coal-fired power plants are designed so as to minimize the amount of pollutants they exhaust.
2.) Coal power is approximately 10 times cheaper than solar or wind power.
3.) Coal power is more reliable than wind or solar power.
4.) Wind and solar power require 300 times as much land as coal-fired plants.
5.) Wind plants require hundreds of monstrous machines as large as buses setting high up in the air and making much noise.
6.) The United States has large resources of coal and needs to use them instead of being dependent on foreign oil.
Bennett is correct that much of the energy generated will probably be exported to other states. He also is correct that carbon dioxide will be generated. The facts are that carbon dioxide is generated when things burn — that includes people and animals breathing. Many experts do not consider elevated carbon dioxide levels to be related to global warming, if indeed there really is global warming.
Nuclear power of course, solves many of the problems that Bennett is concerned about. It is even a little cheaper than coal, generates no carbon dioxide, and the waste generated in the production of energy for the lifetime needs of a family can fit into a one-pint bottle. That waste even can be recycled.
Cliff Doubek
146 Orange Hill Lane
Anaheim CA 92807
California and Illinois;
what about Kansas?
I hope what is happening in California does not happen in the rest of the country. One example recently was in the County of Los Angeles where people were requested to turn off all their lights for three hours one evening. It was explained how much energy that would save.
A few months ago there was an even scarier story. The California Energy Commission proposed that it be mandated that all buildings install programmable-communicable thermostats. These bureaucrats in Sacramento would then be able to decide when we could have heating or cooling in our homes and offices.
Instead of determining how to provide us with more energy and fuel they decided we should be forced to get along with less. California is a large state with much greater energy needs than the state of Illinois. In spite of that very few new power generating facilities have been built here in many decades.
The state has a ban on the construction of new nuclear power plants. California has five nuclear plans as compared to 21 in Illinois. The environmental extremists and global warming disciples oppose nuclear power and any other economical means of power generation.
They push for wind and solar power and a few of those facilities have been built. This in spite of the fact that wind and solar energy cost about 10 times* as much as coal or nuclear and require 300 times as much land.
No wonder we have such high energy bills in California. We depend on importing energy from other states. I wonder how long our neighboring states go along with that?
Gasoline costs in California are much higher than in any other part of the country while there are many sources of oil here and offshore. One of the reasons our gasoline costs are high is because the environmental extremists forced supposedly less polluting formulations on us. This made gasoline more expensive and in short supply at different times of the year.
But you have to wonder about global warming. The wind chill in Chicago yesterday was -30 F and Fairbanks had a high of -21 F and a low of -36 F with temperatures in that range most of the time since mid-November. Not much ice will melt at those temperatures. Our mountains here in California have very large snow accumulations at the present time.
People in California are getting squeezed in many areas. Another is with real estate prices. Homes here in California are at least three times the cost of equivalent homes in other parts of the country. How did they get that way? I say that it was because of speculators and corrupt and incompetent lenders.
The speculators were not just professional speculators but also many ordinary people. They quickly learned that prices were going up at such a rapid rate that they had to get on the band wagon. The market topped out and many could not make the payments. Things got even tougher when they had to contend with higher energy and gasoline prices. I estimate that home prices are down about 25 percent now but need to come down about 50 to 75 percent to be on par with other comparable parts of the country. At market peak (about one and a half years ago) they were up about 1,000 percent from 33 years before that.
Another big problem facing Californians is the deterioration of our higher education system. David Horowitz in his book, "The Professors," writes about 100 educators who he calls dangerous. Here on the West coast there is a large concentration of them at UC Berkeley. One of them there is an admirer of Ayatollah Khomeini. These are really bad people.
Just a few days ago the City of Berkeley announced that it will be forcing the Marine Corps recruiting station out. The city will be providing special access for the CodePink radical anti-war group so they can harass the Marine recruiters. Because of this upside-down thinking, two of our Representatives in the U.S. Congress already have introduced bills to rescind all federal spending for the city.
More on the deterioration of the education system, another professor in another part of the country said, "What a country. It makes me puke." Another failed a student because he did not agree with him even though the disagreement was not on the subject being taught.
I had a firsthand contact with another here in California. I had innocently sent out an e-mail of a picture of the graves at Arlington National Cemetery being decorated at Christmas time. I was so shocked by the response from this professor that I saved it so I could quote it exactly. Here it is: "What do I have to do with the images of dead people you have just e-mailed me? You are a sick-minded person who lacks the ability to distinguish between what's right and what's wrong. Your thoughts and ideas are very similar to Hitler of Nazi Germany!" I should point out that some of the people in those graves died fighting Nazi Germany and I served on a battlefield there. Incidentally, this man was not one of the 100 discussed in the Horowitz book. The number is much greater! Horowitz reports that there are between 1,000 and 10,000 of them teaching in our country.
These are only a few of the stories on the subject. Horowitz has many more in his book. California does not have a monopoly on those people. There so-called dangerous professors also are teaching in Illinois and there is a large concentration of them at Columbia University. I found one of the 900 to 9,900 not listed in the Horowitz book. I wonder who and where the others are?
I should end with one positive note. That is that my favorite universities (Illinois Institute of Technology, California State University Fullerton, and the University of Notre Dame) are not plagued with the above problems.
*Even the very liberal California Energy Commission admits that nuclear power is currently the cheapest source of energy. They say that solar is about 18 times more expensive than nuclear (maybe as much as 26 times more expensive). They say that wind is about twice as expensive as nuclear. The bulk of those hundreds of monstrosities (the size of buses) setting high in the air on thousands of acres of land, making lots of noise is not what I think we want all over the country.
