This doesn’t just affect minorities (that’s comming from Innis’ perspective) – it affects everyone but the very rich. It’s going to get much worse in the coming years as more legislated mandates are phased in.

Our energy policy is suicidal. We don’t currently have the technology to sustain the demands of legal mandates without radically reducing the average family’s energy usage.

This is one thing I am confused upon, however. Hopefully someone can clearly and without bias answer my question. How is the encouragement of alternative fuel/energy sources hindering the lives and civil rights of people? We, in America, are not regulated on how often we can drive our cars (provided we can afford it). We are not rationing the amount of driver’s licenses given out per year due to global climate change. Industry has increased its need for chemists, scientists, researchers, and engineers all searching for better ways of attacking our problems from designing more fuel efficient engines, to balancing the weight of a Boeing 747 more effectively to studying the effects of wind turbines on boundary layer fluid flow dynamics. Ecologists, geologists, biologists, etc are also flourishing. So just exactly what is the problem that minorities are facing?

“From a physical standpoint, efficiency can be defined in terms of the amount of energy contained per unit. The energy density of nuclear power exceeds that of most of the other leading electricity sources. Just one uranium fuel pellet – roughly the size of the tip of an adult’s little finger – contains the same amount of energy as 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas, 1,780 pounds of coal or 149 gallons of oil. There is an exceptional amount of energy contained in the small components of nuclear fuel. As a result, the waste from an individual’s lifetime use of nuclear-generated electricity can fit in the space of a common 12-ounce beverage can.

From a facility “footprint” standpoint, less space is required for a nuclear electric generating facility than for a comparable-capacity wind or solar plant. In fact, to equal the electrical output of a single 3,000 megawatt-electric nuclear generating station, it would take roughly 2,000 wind turbines on somewhere between 150,000 and 180,000 acres or 35,000 acres of solar panels.”

http://www.gnep.energy.gov/pdfs/FS_NuclearFuelEfficiency.pdf

For easy comparison, 35,000 acres of solar panels is equal to 54 square miles (an area the size of Minneapolis). 180,000 acres is equal to 281 square miles.

New York City consumes 5 gigawatts of electricity, or 5,000 megawatts.

Therefore, for wind turbines to generate sufficient energy to power New York City, they would occupy 306,000 acres or 478 square miles. New York City itself occupies less land than this, having a total land area of only 304 square miles. Include the water, and it’s total area is still smaller than it’s theoretical power plant at 468 square miles. Talk about sprawl. Powering NYC by wind turbines would double the city’s land usage overnight.

Would Connecticut have to literally be blanketed from border to border with nothing at all but wind turbines? No, but it would require 10% of that state’s total area (they’d be everywhere – conservatively, I’d say one on every block or it’s equivalent area across the entire volume of the state), or about a third of Rhode Island’s total area to power one city. Imagine implementing this for every city in the US. I think satellite photos of our once green land would resemble the galaxy’s largest bird processing plant. This is supposed to be environmentally friendly?

Mr. Innis asserts that the entire state of Connecticut (5,554 square miles) would have to be blanketed in 300-foot-tall wind turbines just to power New York City. This doesn’t sound like a feasible option to power the nation. It sounds like a boondoggle on a colossal scale. Why should we invest in something like that?

As far as DARPA’s budget, you are aware that the world is a dangerous place, filled with deadly weapons, and with no shortage of leaders with ambitions of conquest, are you not? I think spending money to stay ahead of the curve and defend our nation is probably a good idea. I’m in no mood to learn Russian or Arabic at this point in my life.

Nuclear weapons are unfortunately becomming more common throughout the world. Figuring out a way to prevent one detonating in our backyard is kind of important. A bit more important than trying to develop a fanciful scheme to control global climate patterns, I’d say.

According to the CIA’s annually-published World Factbook, “the US is the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels,” yet the Environmental Protection Agency’s “National Center for Environmental Innovation” is a far cry from a DARPA-like entity. It doled out a mere $737,500 in seven state-innovation grants in 2003. DARPA, by comparison, spent about $3 billion on some 200 projects that ranged from space weapons to unmanned aerial vehicles. But just because the government isn’t pouring money into the projects of scientists eager to attack environmental problems doesn’t mean environmental research is of no interest to it. Quite the opposite. DARPA has taken up the torch and is funding a rigorous research program aimed at finding novel ways to weaponize the natural world, not to mention outer-space.