Corrupt Energy Politics

Energy is THE Most Important Issue Facing America Today

The price and availability of energy impact everything that everyone buys. Escalating energy costs hurt poor people more than the rich. Corrupt subsidies for extremely-profitable companies that input foreign oil sends money to nations that harbor terrorists, and forces us to fight unpopular oil-related deadly wars. It has generated $9 Trillion in debt for our grandchildren, robbed our Social Security Trust Fund, leaving it insolvent, and diverted Trillions of Dollars away from education, healthcare and domestic jobs. Our legislators who have been purchased by fossil-fuel lobbyists cannot possible solve the problems that THEY created for us.

Buildings are THE most significant waster of energy in America – Even more than Transportation or Industry. Reducing building energy waste is even MORE important than dealing with our gas-guzzling environment-damaging inefficient American SUV's.

Since 1977, The U.S. Department Of Energy ( US DOE ) "Weatherization Assistance Program" has shown how quick, inexpensive and easy it is to reduce low-income home energy consumption by an average of 31%. This is the most cost-effective long-term energy consumption reduction program. Its cost-benefit characteristic is outstanding, BUT totally ignored by most American home owners, despite significant government incentive programs. (How sad)

Reducing NEW building energy consumption by 50% is relatively easy to do, at little additional cost (since most buildings are poorly designed by architects with almost no training in modern energy efficiency).

More than 70% energy consumption reductions have been demonstrated in 100,000 near-Zero-Energy Homes since 1978, but perhaps 25 million new buildings have ignored this well-documented technology, and their short-sighted owners are now paying unnecessarily-high energy bills, AND doing great damage to Earth's delicate environment. Worldwide energy conservation retrofits are long overdue. We need an immediate, cost-effective Conservation Transformation.

We need to MANDATE long-proven near-zero energy building codes, and STOP constructing new buildings that uselessly waste 70% to 90% of the expensive energy they consume. Making important global choices about cost effective energy retrofit priorities will become increasingly important. We can ELIMINATE the Trillion Dollar expense of international oil-related wars, and STOP sending our money to countries that harbor terrorists, IF we would end our deadly growing addiction to Persian Gulf oil. In our ZED book, we show precisely how "easily" this can be done with long-proven technology, in only ONE GENERATION.

The ZED solution does NOT require new technology. In conjunction with U.S. Department Of Energy ( US DOE )incentive programs, America demonstrated the primary technology elements decades ago, beginning in 1977. What we still lack today is EDUCATION, AGILITY and POLITICAL DETERMINATION to do what we inevitably will be FORCED to do anyway. The sooner we get started, the less traumatic the transition will be for our children.

Roughly, 85% of today’s electric energy is generated by burning dirty, nonrenewable, carbon-based “fossil fuels.” It has taken millions of years for plants and animals to capture solar energy, and the geologic sedimentation / compression process to convert it into coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Such fossil fuels can NOT be renewed in a millennium, and we are burning most of them up in only a century. Inefficiently burning fossil fuels for energy is quite unsustainable. It is robbing the future from our grandchildren, burdening them with avoidable debt, and leaving them with a badly damaged worldwide environment that cannot provide for our population explosion.

In the last few decades, the world has become very dependent on petrochemicals like plastics, fibers, fabrics, clothes, fiberglass, building materials, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and many others. By squandering petroleum as a dirty fuel for inefficient use in vehicles, heating homes, generating electricity, mining and delivering dirty coal, making biofuels with less energy content, trucks, construction and farm equipment, we are rapidly depleting the source of the petrochemicals that we use to sustain so many aspects of our oil-based inefficient lifestyle.

America is only 4.5% of the world's exploding population, but we consume over 25% of the world's petroleum. Since U.S. internal oil production peaked and began to decline in 1971, we have rapidly increased our gluttonous oil imports to 67%. We've sent Trillions Of U.S. Dollars to oil-rich countries that raise radical suicidal terrorists who want to do us great harm.

Fossil fuels are clearly a short-term, DEAD END ROAD TO DISASTER that cannot be sustained much longer. The entire world MUST nearly eliminate fossil fuel consumption in the 21st Century. (First of all, it won’t be available, AND even if it were, it would cost too much, have unstable / unfriendly sources, lead to international energy wars, and eventually make our environment unlivable.) We must develop alternative energy sources.

Congress Versus The Planet

November 21, 2007 www.solar-nation.org/2007/11/21/congress-versus-the-planet
By Solar Nation’s Executive Campaigner, Chris Stimpson

On the West Coast, emergency crews are continuing to clean up the 58,000 gallons of oil that spilled from a container ship whose radar was better at missing the Golden Gate Bridge than the hull was…

At the UN, they produced a final summary of those IPCC studies that made Nobel Laureates of the scientists involved, spelling out the realities of global warming for those who still think it is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people…

In Kansas, a huge order for utility-scale wind turbines for a wind farm went to a European company, because that industry (pioneered by NASA in the 1970’s) is now virtually non-existent here…

And in Washington, our elected leaders stripped out of the 2007 Energy Bill almost every single provision that could give renewable energy a fighting chance in this country, rather than offend their fossil-fuel-powered benefactors. (Senate Amendment 1704 to House Resolution 6)

When asked about the prospects of taking the bill to conference committee, Republican Senator Trent Lott observed: “the oil and gas industry don’t want to”; so, I guess, we won’t. As a result, the 2007 Energy Bill gives NO encouragement either to individuals wanting to install clean solar panels, or to companies trying to finance utility-scale wind farms. Nor does it establish national minima for renewable energy production. It may, however, make the U.S. taxpayer responsible for underwriting loans for new nuclear plants; it will throw billions of dollars at the questionable technology of corn-based ethanol, and it will allow Detroit to continue with business as usual, digging its own grave while the rest of the world targets 100 mpg.

Republican yes-men from red states are too easy a mark, of course. The dismal fact is that the way Congress governs is fundamentally unsuited to the vital task ahead of us, which is to mitigate our contribution to planet-wide climate change, and solving our avoidable energy crisis.

Somehow, the rest of the industrialized world has figured out what’s needed to keep us from driving ourselves extinct in the next forty to fifty years, (i.e., free, clean, renewable solar and wind energy, and massive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions). As a result, wind farms are common in Europe,
solar panels are sprouting like weeds across Germany, Italy, Japan and China, and their auto mileage standards are already far ahead of what U.S. car makers say they can’t manage by 2020.

But at a government level, we just don’t “get it”, do we? Our legislators, clinging to what they imagine to be a time-honored practice, deal, bargain, and compromise so as to not offend the vested interests on which their next re-election depends, and they defer to pressure from Administrations with questionable motives. As a result, essential bills are diluted to worthlessness. And most damning of all, our leaders allow the money that contaminates all of American politics to make their decisions for them,
to the detriment of Americans and the world, both today and tomorrow.

As Congress recessed for the Thanksgiving holiday, word was that Congressional leaders had heard the huge public outcry against the evisceration of a bill that could have made us take renewable's seriously
for the first time. (82% of Americans polled want the FULL 2007 Energy Bill passed.) Supposedly,
the money may be back on the table; but then, so is the turkey, and look what’s happening to that.

The true nightmare of global warming is not its ineluctability; solutions exist and are being put into practice in many countries. It is, rather, that the world’s greatest polluter is institutionally incapable of mending its ways.

To paraphrase, we have met the enemy, and the enemy is U.S.

Hartweg is a Second-Generation Energy Research Scientist with a proven track record. His previous development efforts have helped generate Billions Of Dollars of Revenue, while lowering consumer cost, developing alternative energy and improving our environment. He provides Executive Management Energy Consulting, Training for Architects, Builders, Legislators, Environmental Groups, and Presentations of “The Future Of Energy,” “Zero Energy Design,” "Alternative Energy Sources", "BioFuel From Food ", "The Politics or Energy" and “Managing Creativity with Major Innovations.”

ZED Is The Number 1 Solution To The World’s Number 1 Unresolved Problem

Contact ZEDmaster@ZeroEnergyDesign.com

Or enroll in the 2007 DOE / ORNL “Three Decades of Lessons Learned” Energy Workshop
www.ornl.gov/sci/buildings/Workshops_07.html#14

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Irrational Corrupt Energy Politics and Bad Legislation
(from an Energy Expert’s Scientific Perspective)

“We have a SERIOUS problem. America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.” – George Bush

Within a single generation, Zero Energy Design principles (in buildings and transportation) have the long-documented potential to completely eliminate the need to import ANY petroleum from unstable Persian Gulf nations, which harbored, funded, and trained the terrorists of 9/11/2001, and some of today’s most expensive international wars (over a TRILLION dollars for Iraq alone).

With spiraling upward oil prices, a TWO TRILLION DOLLAR A YEAR petroleum market, unstable wars / politics / terrorism in the Middle East, an increasingly-belligerent Iran (world’s second largest source of petroleum), the aftermath of Global Warming, Hurricane Katrina, and premium prices for high-gas-mileage cars, ENERGY SECURITY HAS BECOME A MAJOR AMERICAN PUBLIC POLICY PRIORITY.

If Americans followed the recommendations of the U.S. Department Of Energy, and the concepts presented at the huge National Energy Expositions THREE DECADES AGO, American's would now be spending $200 BILLION LESS PER YEAR on energy. Corrupt energy politics, and a general lack of energy education, has prevented rational behavior for FAR TOO LONG. Our non-learning nation needs a major conservation transformation. Imagine what we could do with and extra net $200 BILLION dollars a year: healthcare, education, more-and-better jobs - a prosperous, growing, debt-free economy with NO OIL-RELATED WARS! Alternative Energy can solve this and is available today.

Failed politicians with no track record of worthwhile energy policy improvements over many decades are now blaming their political rivals and large oil companies for price gouging. Hundreds of alternative energy-related bills have been submitted in the U.S. Congress and Senate, since the last insufficient energy bill was passed in 2005. Most of the non-renewable energy legislation that is now being considered merely perpetuates the petroleum-subsidy energy errors and man-made climate change policies of the last hundred years, and does little to correct today’s energy crisis quickly.

The E85 ethanol price subsidy, biodiesel, and coal gasification research do NOT eliminate the terrible greenhouse gases that are accelerating our push toward the Global Warming tipping point. America is badly stuck in an ugly energy quagmire of obsolete technology and misguided political rhetoric by people who have never learned how to live in harmony with nature.

In a June 2006 political rally, John Kerry said: "Our reliance on oil not only props up decaying and dictatorial regimes, but those that tolerate and sustain terrorist groups." He explained that U.S. military success MUST be backed with policies aimed at energy independence to win the war on terrorism.

Of course, the above Kerry quote was based on important truth, BUT how we get there is the argument of the day. Do we need to wait decades to begin implementation of well-known principles of ZED from 27 years ago?

Beyond what politicians like Bush and Kerry say, our ultimate goal in the war on terrorism AND energy price increases, must be elimination of the modern American waste of gigantic amounts of expensive petroleum, and replacement with an abundant supply of inexpensive clean renewable energy (available almost everywhere in the U.S. for free) from the sun. Any solution that involves burning anything (except totally clean hydrogen) will result in perpetuating the deadly pace of greenhouse gases that cause Global Warming. Even hydrogen that is now being produced inefficiently from natural gas contributes to the serious Global Warming problem, since natural gas hydrogen production releases CO₂.

Solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal energy are essentially the only immediately available popular renewable energy technology solutions that do not put Global Warming CO₂ into the atmosphere, and of those, solar energy is superior in a great many ways. Nicoli Tesla’s first Niagara Falls power plant was a wonderful thing, but the best hydroelectric sites have already been developed. Wind power is a good solution, but it is not as widely available as is direct solar energy for heating and cooling air and water, and for photovoltaic electric energy. Geothermal hot springs are valuable, but there are relatively few of them around the earth. Direct photochemical production of hydrogen from water is an interesting laboratory possibility, but the experts in the field think it is at least 15 years away from commercialization. There are several possibilities to take advantage of ocean currents, waves and temperature differentials, but their cost effectiveness has yet to be demonstrated. In contrast, many passive solar homes were very cost-effective three decades ago, and even better now. We need additional funding for these alternative energy resources.

The infrastructure to support the heavily-subsidized, petroleum-based American economy is aging rapidly. America reached its oil-producing peak in the early 1970’s, and we have been declining ever since. The petroleum that is still being produced in the U.S. costs over $10 a barrel just to get out of the ground to the pump, and the finite supply is being rapidly depleted. In contrast, Saudi Arabian oil only costs about $0.80 to produce (but we paid up to $77 a barrel for it in 2006). The Saudi’s (wisely) lowered oil prices for the American 2006 election to help keep oil-friendly politicians in office and reduce the political backlash against petroleum, but in the future, America will soon see oil prices rise again to new highs over $80 a barrel and beyond. Middle eastern oil producers have learned how to manipulate non-learning Americans like a drug pusher does with his hopeless drug addicts.

New American petroleum refineries have not been built since U.S. oil production peaked in the 1970’s, and old ones are literally exploding under the high stress we must place on them to meet growing gasoline demand. George Bush has proposed shortsighted increased petroleum subsidies and building new petroleum refineries (on closed military bases). This myopic oil-expansion mind set is NOT a sustainable energy future. Ultimately, petroleum is a dead end dirt road to disaster. Anything that delays its demise (like Ronald Reagan’s petroleum subsidies) is a stupid step in the wrong direction.

Critical pipelines like the Alaskan Prudhoe Bay supply line and others are failing, due to poor design, faulty construction, poor operation, delayed expensive maintenance, etc. At the first of 2006, the North Slope's biggest ever oil spill was discovered when a critical pipeline leaked 267,000 gallons of oil before it was noticed and stopped. George Bush proposes significantly increasing oil production in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) by a million barrels a day. The petroleum industry is progressively getting much WORSE not better. The high price we pay at the pump is NOT being reinvested wisely in maintaining the critical petroleum infrastructure, or replacing petroleum with a superior alternative. If petroleum companies making unprecedented windfall profits refuse to invest wisely in their own infrastructure or a superior alternative, then the rest of America should NOT invest in petroleum companies with continued huge tax subsidies for their ongoing shortsighted stupidity!

It will be VERY expensive to repair the declining American oil infrastructure now, and even more so in the near future. Consumers and taxpayers will ultimately carry the full weight of the economic hardship caused by extreme mismanagement of energy. It is not just the materials and labor to repair the many infrastructure problems that keep surprising inept myopic governments and corporate mismanages. It is also the economic damage to the environment, federal/state/local government tax base, institutions and individuals that depend on our rapidly failing petroleum infrastructure. Recent oil refinery fires/explosions and pipeline failures have done damage to all of these.

Do Americans really want to spend a TRILLION dollars to rebuild the failing petroleum infrastructure? - So we can continue to support Persian Gulf countries that tolerate and sustain terrorists, and the inept, over-paid executives of our large oil companies? OR, would that huge sum of money be better spent on rapidly implementing ZERO ENERGY DESIGN and clean alternative renewable energy production and efficient energy usage in complete harmony with nature, with NO greenhouse gases?

You vote with your dollars every time you buy a gas guzzling SUV, pay your ever-escalating energy bills (when you could avoid them altogether), or send taxes to outrageously inept politicians that you help elect (by voting unwisely, or by not going to the polls).

ZED actually applauds the fact that disruptions in American oil supply are regularly impacting the price and availability of oil to Americans, BECAUSE supply disruptions (oil, power grid, etc.) are a reality that SHOULD make our nation quickly rethink our dependence on our unstable, declining, polluting, obsolete energy sources. Excellent renewable alternative energy sources like solar energy solutions are READILY AVAILABLE. We merely need to lose our ridiculous resistance to inevitable change. If $10 / gallon gasoline pump price, $10 natural gas, and $1 per KWH electricity will make it happen faster, then BRING IT ON! (But, we MUST subsidize those poor people who can least afford it during the necessary transition away from yesterday’s misguided subsidies of bad political energy policies.)

An outage in a critical petroleum infrastructure like the Gulf of Mexico oil platforms after hurricane Katrina can surely disrupt essential energy in the U.S. drastically. Very poor (inept and ignorant) energy policies, and bad resource management, have made our nation very ENERGY INSECURE. Our short sighted Non-Learning Nation is operating on the edge of a knife that can cut us deeply with only a small (predictable) oil infrastructure failure, act of terrorism, natural disaster, or imported oil disruption from countries that do not agree with our unpopular wars and domineering religious politics. OPEC controls the energy resources that we are badly addicted to, and radical Arabians (and Venezuelans) are getting madder at us every day. We saw what OPEC did in 1973, and we failed to learn the critical lesson back then. We saw what they did to us on 9/11/2001 and have now felt the TRILLIONS of dollars of economic impact of that one event for over five years. We watch our brave patriotic children die in unpopular oil-related Persian Gulf wars. When will we begin to comprehend the many mistakes of our bad energy policy ways? Will we EVER wake up and learn anything from our stupid American energy errors, and IGNORE-ance of the truth that was clearly demonstrated 27 years ago and subsidized by the President who wisely created the U.S. Department of Energy (US DOE)?.

Learn How To Solve Our Many Energy Problems in Larry Hartweg's $25 800-page ebook on CD-ROM:
Zero Energy Design
Abundant Energy In Harmony With Nature

Byproducts of Making Ethanol	AlternativeFuture Energy Slides(New)	ZED Summary for Legislators	We Are What We Imagine	Integrated Innovations
Fossil Fuel Pollution Types =	Sulfur Dioxide (SO2)	Ozone (O3)	Nitrogen Oxides (NOx)	Mercury (Hg)

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