By Brett Bursey
Director, SC Progressive Network
Upon our state’s preparing to secede from the Union, James Petigru observed, “South Carolina is too large to be a lunatic asylum and too small to be a republic.” True to form, it seems our legislators insist on swimming against history’s tide and holding fast to all manner of lunacy.
On Thursday, Feb. 19, the legislature will be holding hearings on bills that may prove Petigru wrong about limits on the size of an asylum.
The Senate Agriculture Committee is taking up (again) a bill (S-232) at 10am in 406-Gressett, to include nuclear power as a “renewable” resource. While it is a fantasy of the nuclear industry to catch the renewable energy wave by painting nuclear fusion green, there is not a damn thing renewable about nuclear power except the industry’s audacity. (Remember in the 1950s when radiation was measured in “sunshine units”?)
These same lunatics run the asylum that passed legislation last session to let private corporations charge rate payers – up front – to build nuclear reactors. SCE&G predicts a 37 percent increase in your utility bills over the next decade to subsidize construction that can’t get private financing or insurance. It’s likely that the final bill will be twice what SCE&G claims.
A rational legislature, concerned about our energy future, could have put a similar golden carrot on the stick that led to the development of real renewable resources.
How many of us would install solar panels if we could pay for them incrementally over a decade? How many good and enduring jobs could be generated if we put support behind real renewables? The $4.5 billion dollar reactor is predicted to provide 500 jobs after construction. That’s a cost of $9 million a job.
At the same Senate Agriculture hearing Thursday, Sen. Robert Ford will be pushing a bill (S-44) that opens our coast to offshore drilling and expedited DHEC licenses. It remains to be seen whether the Obama administration will remove federal prohibitions on coastal oil and gas drilling.
Ford, you may recall, is the black legislator who said America isn’t ready for a black president. At the time, Ford was on Hillary Clinton’s payroll.
How many of us would install solar panels if we could pay for them incrementally over a decade? How many good and enduring jobs could be generated if we put support behind real renewables? The $4.5 billion dollar reactor is predicted to provide 500 jobs after construction. That’s a cost of $9 million a job.
If this post weren’t so patetically stupid, it would be funny. Renewables. Right. Why don’t people put their money where their mouths are and disconnect from the gird? Rely stricly on solar, wind and the rest? Why? Because you morons already know it won’t work and it’s unaffordable. As for SCE&G paying for it upfront, take an econ class, please! It will be much cheaper paying for it that way, than waiting until it’s finished. You’re likely the same dolts who voted for Obama, thinking that we can all get out of debt by going into more debt – yep. Good plan. Good luck with that too.
The vast majority of jobs created through a green economic recovery program are in the same areas of employment that people already work in today. Constructing wind farms, for example, creates jobs for sheet metal workers,
machinists, and truck drivers, among many others. Increasing the energy efficiency of buildings through retrofitting requires roofers, insulators, and building inspectors. These are jobs local South Carolinians can fill. Most of the temporary jobs building a nuclear reactor come from a transient work force that specializes in this type of one time construction. For every billion spent on green jobs, we can create over 25,000 jobs. That would be around 100,000 jobs for the cost of a nuke that would create 4,000 jobs to build.
You too can know facts that come from somewhere other than the corporations that want to keep us on THEIR grid. There are good state based studies on green energy alternatives at http://www.americanprogress.org.