By Seth Grossman, Political Columnist
For years, American conservatives like me have been telling environmental extremists like Christine Guhl of the Sierra Club, Matt Blake of the American Littoral Society, and Rick Dovey of the taxpayer funded Atlantic County Utilities Authority (ACUA) to go fly a kite.
At noon this Friday, June 15, they will actually do it.
The Sierra Club is sponsoring a ?community kite flying event? at 10th Street and the Boardwalk in Ocean City to celebrate ?Global Wind Day.?
Global Wind Day was set up by leftists in Europe several years ago to promote higher taxes and electric bills to pay for enough inefficient and unreliable wind turbines to produce about 10 percent of our electricity.?(Now,?New Jersey is at less than 1 percent.)
Global Wind Day is not celebrated in China, India, or Brazil, where new oil and coal power plants are built every week to power the factories that produce all the things it is now too expensive to make here in the United States.
The Sierra Club is also lobbying Republican Gov. Chris Christie not to veto the bill passed by Democrats in the Legislature last month that would bring to New Jersey the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which amounts to a complicated and expensive multimillion dollar hidden tax on every electric company, factory, and casino.
Many conservatives, including members of LIBERTYandPROSPERITY.org, also plan to be in Ocean City this Friday.?We want to teach how ignorant, dishonest, tyrannical, and corrupt the wind energy racket has become.
First we want to remind them that global warming and climate change did not begin with capitalism, coal-burning generators or gasoline powered cars. Anyone who looks at a lump?of Pennsylvania coal will quickly see images of tropical plants ? proof that most of Pennsylvania was once a tropical rainforest.?Anyone with basic knowledge of geology can quickly recognize out-of-place?rocks in the Poconos, and our unique New Jersey J beach sand, as evidence of giant sheets of ice that moved and crushed rocks when they covered most of New Jersey some 10,000 years ago ? before they melted when the most recent global warming period began.
Second, we will point out some of?half-truths on the ?Wind Farm Fact Sheet? posted at the?www.acua.com?website. The ACUA claims what its wind turbines are ?capable of producing.? But it avoids stating what those turbines actually produced during the past six years.
On many hot days when electricity is needed the most, there is no wind, and the $12.5 million turbines produce nothing. When the wind blows too hard, the turbines must be shut down, and also produce nothing. I recall many summer days stuck in my sailboat in the ocean with no wind ? and watching the motionless ACUA wind turbines in the distance. (Until I cranked up my tiny gas engine and motored home).
The ACUA ?estimates? that its wind turbines ?will? save roughly 12,000 barrels of crude oil per year. But the truth is that the ACUA wind turbines saved little if any coal or oil from being burned during the past six years. Wind power is so unreliable that coal and oil generators must be ready to pour electric current into the grid every time the wind dies down for a moment. So coal and oil generators must stay ?fired up? and burning fossil fuels even when the wind turbines are moving.
It is true that the ACUA saved $2.9 million on its electric bill during the past six years. But that is because state laws pushed through by Republicans and Democrats forced every customer of Atlantic City Electric to pay the private investors who own the ACUA wind turbines roughly $600 every time they generated $60 worth of electricity.
Because of this (and other scams of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities), New Jersey has the fourth highest electric rates in the country. That is why our electric bills keep going up even though the cost of abundant natural gas from Pennsylvania keeps going down. And why businesses like Wheaton, Lenox China, and Ocean Spray leave New Jersey.
Please help us teach the truth about wind energy noon Friday, June 15, in Ocean City.?See www.libertyandprosperity.org?or contact me by phone or email.
(Reprinted from Current-Gazette Newspapers of Atlantic and Cape May Counties, http://www.shorenewstoday.com/snt/news/index.php/politics/25885-teaching-the-truth-about-the-wind-energy-racket.html)
Somers Point attorney Seth Grossman appears on 92.1FM 8-9 a.m. Saturday. For information see www.libertyandprosperity.org, email sethgrossman49@gmail.com or call (609) 927-7333. Breakfast discussions are held 9:30-10:30 a.m. every Saturday at the Shore Diner on Fire and Tilton roads in Egg Harbor Township.
(Image Sources – http://www.turn180.ie/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/GreeninGreenEnergy.jpg & http://www.epaw.org/photos/Ducks_feel_good_green.jpg)