Goofy Gore plan

Vincent Carroll:

He's a former vice president of the United States, Nobel Prize winner and best-selling author, so the lavish news coverage of Al Gore's latest brainstorm was inevitable. Less understandable is why an idea so irresponsible - in economic terms, in fact, just this side of deranged - attracted so little ridicule.

Gore proposed last week that the United States "commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years."

Not just all new electricity, mind you, which would be challenging enough. But all existing electricity, too.

This would of course require utilities to mothball hundreds of existing power plants as they launched a crash construction program of solar plants, wind farms and transmission lines costing hundreds of billions and perhaps trillions of dollars. (To put this in perspective, T. Boone Pickens, another fellow who's caught the wind-power bug, claims on his Web site, "Building wind facilities in the corridor that stretches from the Texas panhandle to North Dakota could produce 20 percent of the electricity for the United States at a cost of $1 trillion. It would take another $200 billion to build the capacity to transmit that energy to cities and towns.")

Gore would subject 300 million people to an experiment in which baseload power that is needed 24 hours a day to keep the economy - and our livelihoods - humming is replaced willy nilly by power sources still susceptible to natural disruption (such as lack of wind or lingering cloud cover), that cost more (at least in the case of solar) and are far less plentiful in some regions than others (Colorado is lucky at least in that regard).

He'd inflict monumental utility price hikes on consumers who'd pay for both the shutdown of old plants and construction of the new - with who knows what economic fallout.

With such a short timetable, we'd have to shred this nation's federal system of utility regulation in favor of national directives, presumably from Congress or a muscle-flexing Environmental Protection Agency charged with regulating greenhouse gases. Not since World War II have we seen anything remotely comparable in terms of central planning.

Stanley Lewandowski, the general manager of the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, is one of the few utility officials willing to suggest that the prophet of global warming is strutting about like an emperor without his clothes. "Al Gore's statement of obtaining 100 percent of our power from renewables in 10 years has as much a chance of happening as the sun shining 24 hours a day," Lewandowski quipped. "It's nonsense."

...

It does contain the inherent arrogance of liberalism. Ignore the consequences, just forcus on the intentions. Gore also uses magical thinking to first beleive it is possible to do such a thing and then to beleive that it will provide some economic windfall rather than a disaster. It reminds us again how lucky we are that this guy never became President.

Voters are not impressed by the Gore plan.