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hen your local neighborhood environmentalists wax poetic about alternative energy, remember that they really hate viable alternative energy solutions because they represent progress and man exerting his will over nature.

You scoff.  I prove it.

Last Friday, the Center for Biological Depravity Diversity and Sierra Club cleared a major hurdle in our campaign to defeat the Sunrise Powerlink, a controversial transmission line proposed for Southern California, when the state’s Public Utilities Commission proposed two decisions opposing the project’s current plan. The administrative law judge’s proposed decision would totally deny San Diego Gas & Electric’s request to build the 150-mile-long transmission line, planned to stretch from the Imperial Valley desert to San Diego and cut across Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, as well as many other protected parks and preserves. This decision, if adopted, will mean a complete victory for the Center, the Sierra Club, and Southern California, halting a project that would ravage species habitat, contribute to global warming, and pose a significant wildfire threat.

What the CBD coyly and dishonestly doesn’t say in its email (which you can sign up for here) is that the Sunrise Powerlink is more than a “controversial transmission line” - it’s a transmission line dedicated wholly to carrying “Save the Earth” solar and geothermal power from plants in the desert to power users in San Diego.

It would not “ravage species habitat” - power lines go through species habitat throughout the region and, in fact, the habitat that’s protected around these lines creates wildlife movement corridors that enhance species populations.

It would not “contribute to global warming” - it would reduce reliance on California’s oil-burning electric power plants.

It would not “pose a significant wildlife threat” - few birds a year might die from electric shocks. That’s insignificant (unless you’re a wildlife absolutist).

The enviros forced measures through our legislature requiring electric utilities to rely more and more on alternative energy sources, but when the utilities actually try to do this, they face this kind of litigation and obfuscation from the greenies.

I see them as hypocrites, but it’s important to remember that there’s one word that describes them much better:  Fundamentalists.  And their aggressive adherance to their belief system is more akin to the Islamist jihadists than it is to the Christian fundamentalists they so often ridicule.

Sunday Scan items are published as each is completed; most recent at the top, so be sure to click through if you see the “continue reading” note at the bottom of the post. This note will be removed after the last item is posted, so if you’re reading this, please come back for more.

Palin Packs ‘Em In

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ere’s the report from Shawn Steele (fomrer Cal. GOP chair) from last night’s Sarah Palin event in SoCal:

Not since Ronald Reagan’s final campaign rally at Orange County’s Mile Square Park on the eve of the 1984 election, have thousands of Californian Republicans gathered. Neither Bush could do it. None of last year’s Republican presidential candidates could fill the Home Depot Tennis Center.

The Center has 13,000 court side seats. All those seats plus the suites were filled to capacity. Still thousands more were slowly streaming into the stadium quickly filled up the court yard. Thousands more found standing room around the rim of the stadium. Over 20,000 people were there to celebrate, shout and scream.

SNL can continue to poke fun at Palin, but real people get her and want to get close to her. If you have any doubts what she’s done to the ticket, check out who introduced her:

Shelly Mandell, the current President of Los Angeles National Organization for Women [NOW] — in the Republican OC suite several of us were scratching our heads— introduced Sarah Palin. It was an awkward introduction. . Mandell, stated she didn’t agree with Sarah on everything, that she is a democrat, that she Mandell supported the failed Equal Rights Amendment campaign but the crowd exercised tolerance. Ms. Mandell will get a lot of angry calls from the hard left, but she embraced the moment and stood with Sarah Palin.

The OC Register also covered the event:

“Electrifying,” “genuine” and “inspiring” were a few of the adjectives that Orange County voters used to describe Sarah Palin after her rally at the Home Depot Center in Carson on Saturday.

The lead of the LA Times story was a bit different:

You can’t say she didn’t warn them.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin introduced herself to the nation with a now-famous joke about lipstick being the only difference between a certain dog breed and a hockey mom. On Saturday, the Republican vice presidential nominee unleashed her inner pit bull, accusing Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama of being someone who would “pal around with terrorists.”

The reporter let us know that in her opinion (yes, yes, it was a news story, I know) Palin’s new tone was “abrasive.” That’s a fine alternative for “truthful,” isn’t it?

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n California, we have Proposition 7 on the ballot in November, which would require the state’s utilities to use 50% alternative energy by 2025, up from our already difficult to achieve goal of 20 percent by 2010.

Nearly all of the money given in support of Prop 7 has come from one man, Peter Sperling, who’s given $7.5 million of mostly Daddy’s Money (Daddy founded the University of Phoenix). Sperling is another of those tedious heirs with a cause. Quite an heir, actually, America’s 301st richest individual.

The SacBee story tells us nothing more than the University of Phoenix hook; Forbes (linked above) tells us a bit more:

Father, John: Cambridge-educated humanities professor at San Jose U. Left academia to start for-profit University of Phoenix 1970s. Became Apollo Group; public 1994. Today enrolls more than 300,000 students in more than 100 programs for associate, bachelor’s, master’s degrees online or in classroom. Peter serves as senior vice president. Company faced numerous lawsuits; allegedly violated Higher Education Act by paying its recruiters based on number of students they enrolled; fined $10 million. Securities fraud: estimated $270 million damage award against company for misleading investors recently overturned. (emphasis added)

Sperling, who is so very concerned about California’s carbon footprint, owns more than 30 homes, says Ballotpedia:

In November 2002, Sperling paid $32 million for a home in San Francisco (right) -the record price at that time for a San Francisco home. The home was later placed on the market for $65 million, after approximately $18 million was spent to improve it. As of 2007, no one had lived in the home. News reports indicate that Sperling owns more than 30 homes throughout the world.

Speaking of carbon footprints, what do you suppose the carbon footprints of these Peter Sperling enterprises might be?

Sperling is also the Chairman and a founder of Communication Services, Inc., a Phoenix, AZ-based full-service communication engineering and construction firm serving the U.S. Coast Guard, FBI, Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. commercial wireless industry. In addition, Sperling is Chairman of Ecliptic Enterprises, a Pasadena, CA-based provider of integrated space imaging and telemetry and payload deployment systems for NASA, JPL, the NRO and the commercial satellite industry, and he is also a principal in Daedalus Real Estate Advisors, a developer of commercial office and industrial property.

(OK, it’s not all Daddy’s money; that’s why I added the “mostly” above.)

Despite the dubiousness of Sperling’s efforts to force Californians to be more carbon-light than he is himself, SacBee appears to be as close to Sperling as Gwen Ifell is to Obama. Here’s how the article described opponents of the bill:

The state’s biggest utility companies, PG&E and Edison International, are opposing the measure and have donated more than $27.5 million to the cause. Sempra, an energy company, has contributed another $104,000.

You cannot live in California and not know that every major environmental group in the Golden State is vehemently opposed to Prop 7, including the California League of Conservation Voters, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club California and Union of Concerned Scientists. Also opposed are solar manufacturers by the dozens. Their point:

An unprecedented and diverse coalition of solar, wind and renewable energy companies, consumer, taxpayer, senior, labor, small businesses, local governments and environmental organizations all oppose Proposition 7 on the November ballot. Prop. 7 was placed on the ballot by an Arizona billionaire with no expertise in renewable power issues. The measure purports to increase the percent of renewable power utilities must purchase. However, it is so poorly drafted that renewable energy and environmental experts warn Prop. 7 will not achieve its goals and, instead, will actually “slam the brakes” on renewable energy development in California, result in significant increases in our electric bills and could result in another energy crisis. Prop. 7.

By making the utilities the only stated opponents, the SacBee article will drive many to support Prop. 7. Is the SacBee guilty of incredibly shoddy or incredibly biased reporting? It’s got to be one or the other.

Super Nan Readies For Denver Showdown

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est you think this week’s Democratic convention in Denver will be just a showcase for the pontificating and grandstanding leaders of the party that knows what’s good for us even if we don’t, Nancy Pelosi stands ready to set you straight. This is no small deal.

“We’ve got a planet to save. Nothing less is at stake other than civilization as we know it today.” (source)

Thank God we’ve got a proven, capable Dem savior like Barack Obama to get us through the fight with the super-nemesis, Maverick Man.

And Joe Biden? The perfect sidekick for The Mighty O and Super Nan, sez Madam Speaker:

“Joe Biden is the all-American boy.”

I’m sure he looks great in tights, too.

hat-tip: Urgent Agenda

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o listen to Nancy Pelosi, the GOP is fixated on drilling and drilling only, while the Dems want a healthy smörgåsbord (oxymoron alert!) of energy options. I’ll translate: She’s fabricating the GOP policy and the Dem smörgåsbord is all kinds of oil, as long as it’s grossly over-regulated and negatively incentivized, and all kinds of alternative fuels - except nuclear - as long as they have zero environmental impact and don’t raise the price of arugula.

For all the hoopla on wind - which overlooks the Dem constituencies that fight wind installations - it will never be ready for prime time, says Dr. Robert Zubrin of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies:

Simply to replace the 18% of our natural gas we currently import would require multiplying the nation’s current total wind power tenfold; to free up enough domestic natural gas to replace half our gasoline would require a thirty-fold wind power increase. The feasibility of doing this is very doubtful, not merely because of the size of the project but because wind power is intrinsically unreliable. When the wind speed drops in half, power output drops by a factor of eight, so wind simply cannot provide the baseload power.

And remember: Enviros will sue to stop the windmill farms (can you say “Kennedy?”) and the construction of new transmission lines to carry solar- and wind-generated electricity from the deserts and plains to the cities (Why, it’s the Sierra Club!) .

To solve the energy crisis America needs to get real. Aggressive responses will require environmental impacts, but those impacts will be regulated and excesses will be penalized by laws already in place. And the Enviros will have to forfeit their desire to save every bunny and bush from any contact with evil humans.

Torture, Torture, Torture! It’s The American Way

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e Americans just have to swallow hard and admit it: Abu Ghraib just reflects our national loving fixation with torture. We’re just a torturing bunch. Why, we can even buy sophisticated Tortureware® for our own happy use! So sez the UN:

TASER electronic stun guns are a form of torture that can kill, a UN committee has declared after several recent deaths in North America.

“The use of these weapons causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture,” the UN’s Committee against Torture said. …

The UN committee made its comments in recommendations to Portugal, which has bought the newest Taser X26 stun gun for use by police.

Portugal “should consider giving up the use of the Taser X26,” as its use can have a grave physical and mental impact on those targeted, which violates the UN’s Convention against Torture, the experts said.

Pornography is supposedly hard to define, despite the “I know it when I see it”‘ definition that works for most of us. Pansy bureaucrats who concern themselves with a Quixotic quest for a perfect world are telling us that torture is too hard for us to know when we see it, and by defining more and more practices as torture, they’re just playing into the hands of the bad guys.

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wo weeks back, the non-Council entries in the Watcher’s Council reading list included Heavyweight physics prof weighs into climate/energy scrap from The (UK) Register, in which physicist David MacKay pretty much decimated any hopes of a clean, energy efficient world that has a standard of living approximating what we (and I mean that as the big “we,” not just America) are used to. Particularly compelling was this:

Skipping one bath saves a much energy as leaving your TV off standby for over six months. People who wash regularly, wear clean clothes, consume hot food or drink, use powered transport of any kind and live in warm houses have no need to worry about the energy they use to power their electronics; it’s insignificant compared to the other things.

Ever since reading it, looking at our household laundry has depressed me. Being Americans means we are B.O.-adverse (that’s Body Odor, not Barack Obama, but we’re B.O.-adverse in the political sense at the Pearce Plaza, too), so we tend to wash our clothes after one or two wearings, and to get the job done, we use “a witches brew of chemicals,” to lift a phrase from any nearby environmental reporter.

Worse, having had four females in the house, we actually have two sets of washers and dryers, and there have been days when they’ve been working full-time to keep us all looking and smelling like our fine, fine selves.

But now MacKay’s burdened me with laundry guilt. I’m not about to go around like Michael Moore in stained (and I presume smelly) old shirts, so what am I to do?

I have predicted here at C-SM that Greenie hand-wringing about this manner of dread is all for naught; human ingenuity solves all problems, and it certainly should be able to lift laundry depression! And it can! Witness, from Jamie Merrill, writing in The (UK) Independent:

Scientists working for the US military have used self-cleaning fabrics to create T-shirts and underwear that can be worn for weeks without washing. The garments, which use nanoparticles and chemicals to repel water, oil and bacteria, cost £14m to develop and have been licensed to Alexium Group in London for civilian use. Available soon.

Nano-technology to the rescue! We’ll be tossing that washer and dryer in no time! Not only that, but in a household where the female demographic is somewhat overwhelming, we may even by generating our own uniquely feminine power soon. From the same article cited above:

It turns out that the physics of breast motion has been studied closely for the last two decades by a gamut of researchers – most of them women. LaJean Lawson, a former professor of exercise science at Oregon State University, has been researching breast motion since 1985 and now works as a consultant for companies such as Nike to develop better sports-bra designs.

Lawson is enthusiastic about [harnessing breast motion to generate power for a runner's iPod], but warns that it will be tricky to execute. You would need the right breast size and the right material, she explains, and the bra itself would have to be cleverly designed. “It’s just a matter of finding the sweet spot, between reducing motion to the point where it’s comfortable but still allowing enough motion to power your iPod,” she says. Lawson explains that breasts move on three different axes: from side to side, front to back, and up and down. The most motion is generated on the vertical axis. Naturally, the bigger the breast, the more momentum it generates. “Let’s face it – if you’re a double-A marathoner, you’re probably not going to get that iPod up and running,” Lawson says.

Here’s an idea that could work particularly well in SoCal, land of breast enhancement, since we learn that a D-cup in a bra with low-support characteristics (the kind preferred by most men, but shunned for some reason by most women) can travel as much as 35 inches up and down during an exercise session, while a B-cup in a high-support bra barely moves an inch.

Perhaps Congress could pass a law giving an energy tax credit to women who upsize their chestal region.

Sophomoric humor aside, all this is why I’m an optimist instead of a screaming banshee of doom. God gave the human mind an nearly infinite capacity to be curious and to solve problems. We haven’t even convinced ourselves that global warming is a problem, but already we’re recruiting permanently clean skivvies and juice-generating bras into the solution!