Bushit as Renewable Energy

The Shrub, complete with his entourage of fifteen SUV's, two bullet-proof limousines, two C-17's, a B-747 and a few Buckley AFB F-16's protecting the airspace, came to Denver to tout his energy policy. In short, about the only energy saved in the visit was the grounding of Denver's traffic helicopter fleet due to a temporary flight restriction.

In a remarkable display of synchronicity, yesterday the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden received $5 million that had been cut from the budget back to re-hire the 31 people who had been sacrificed to the President's monetary priorities. We all know how to see a person's real priorities: Follow the money. He put his money where his mouth is by cutting $28 million total from the laboratory's budget. For those who don't know or can't connect the dots, this is one of the premier laboratories where renewable energy is being researched. The $5 million prevent the loss of the 31 employees. The budget for the lab is still $23 million short.

At the lab, he displayed his ignorance, if not outright hostility, to science by stating that we weren't far from plug-in cars and that these could potentially drive to and from work and back without even starting the engine! It's a wonderful idea but what the Shrub apparently missed in one of his Science for Dummies, excuse me, Gentlemen at Princeton was that it takes the same amount of energy to get there whether it is from burning gasoline in an internal combustion engine, using solar energy gathered from the roof or burning coal five hundred miles away, sucking up transmission losses of up to 50%, dealing with inefficiencies in charging the batteries and crashing the electrical grid as everyone charges their car at night. This ignorance of the first law of thermodynamics, that energy can neither be created or destroyed, illustrates the Bush ignorance of all things more complex than invade, vote, gather money and cut taxes. Either Crawford truely is missing an idiot or Bush is playing to the Nascar crowd, those to whom science is something that preceeds fiction.

Bush's plan also touts ethanol, a good idea except for one problem: In terms of energy, it takes one and a quarter gallons of ethanol to produce a gallon. Distillation, distribution, farming the corn, all of these take energy, so much that the sum is greater than the energy produced. Production from waste may some day be more effective but it would also be problematic to me to burn corn while people starve. Doesn't matter to the right, though. And it's popular in the grain belt. It's politically a good idea so, since the Shrub drank his way through science class, it must be a good one. So I'll raise a glass of ethanol cut with water and aromatic chemicals to the thought that, in three years, we can send Crawford its idiot back.