International Day of False Peace

According to United Nations Resolution 55/282, September 21 was the International Day of Peace.

The official language of the UN resolution states that the International Day of Peace provides “an invitation to all nations and people to honour a cessation of hostilities for the duration of the Day.” Furthermore, the General Assembly “invites all Member States, organizations of the United Nations system, regional and non-governmental organizations and individuals to commemorate, in an appropriate manner, the International Day of Peace, including through education and public awareness, and to cooperate with the United Nations in the establishment of the global ceasefire.”

It’s worth asking: Does the UN’s International Day of Peace actually establish any meaningful standard of civilized political conduct? If so, is it a standard to which the United Nations itself adheres? Or, even as it proclaims peace, does the United Nations deliberately choose to promote international evil and terror within its programs and proceedings?

The inescapable verdict is already abundantly clear. The United Nations has an inconvenient and blatantly unapologetic track record of doing things which are un-peaceful in the extreme, exemplified by the election by secret ballot in 2003 to elevate Libya to leadership of the UN Commission on Human Rights (Yes, that Libya, the country whose government, under Muammar Gaddafi, ordered the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and then, still unrepentant, welcomed terrorist Abdel Basset al-Megrahi—a lead perpetrator of the bombing—to a hero’s homecoming last month).

And beyond rewarding terrorist states by expanding their influence, the United Nations has throughout its history made anti-Israeli bias its most prominent organizing policy principle. This treatment includes the long-term disbarment of Israel from the UN’s regional group that Jewish interests ought to be represented in, and an unfortunately predictable steady stream of anti-Israel resolutions that have poured out of the General Assembly for decades.

Now, in a violently ironic foreshadowing of the farcical nature of the International Day of Peace, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched a diatribe on September 18th, proclaiming that the Holocaust—the historical catalyst for the 1948 establishment of the modern state of Israel—is a myth. In an unhinged rant, Ahmadinejad dismissed the murder of six million Israelis as a fable, and consigned the Jewish state to annihilation.

"The pretext for the creation of the Zionist regime is false,” said Ahmadinejad. “It is a lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim." Speaking to an anti-Israel rally in Tehran, Ahmadinejad called for Israel’s obliteration. “Confronting the Zionist regime is a national and religious duty…this regime will not last long. Do not tie your fate to it ... This regime has no future. Its life has come to an end.”

On the very day Ahmadinejad called for the destruction of Israel, the Jewish High Holy Days began at sundown. Spanning ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, the Jewish High Holy Days coincide on the calendar with the UN’s International Day of Peace and the opening tomorrow (Wednesday, September 23) of the 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly.

And guess who headlines the United Nations’ speaker line-up? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Riding a wave of monomaniacal global defiance as he threatens world war and pursues intercontinental ballistic nuclear weaponry, Ahmadinejad will address the world’s population from the General Assembly’s platform 48 hours after the United Nations asked the world’s population to observe and honor the International Day of Peace.

Among Ahmadinejad’s favorite activities is the full-throated support and promotion o f Hezbollah, the anti-Israel terrorist movement led by Lebanon’s Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. Responding to Ahmadinejad’s “death to Israel” outrage this week, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was murderously succinct in his approval: "Our belief and creed ... remain that Israel is an illegal entity, a cancerous tumor that must cease to exist.”

International Day of Peace anyone?

Ahmadinejad isn’t the only prominent speaker at this week’s UN grand opening. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi also speaks on Day One.

And so does Barack Obama.

The President of the United States faces a defining moment. Will he fight the deadly despotism and terrorist hate surrounding him at the ceremonies, or will he fold? Will he courageously defend America’s moral force in blazing a true path to international peace? Will he fearlessly defend Israel’s existence and the opportunities of its people? Or will he seek to please his audience with global-speak pablum coupled with inoffensive applaud-line platitudes? Obama’s brief international record does not inspire confidence.

As Ronald Reagan famously, and enduringly, asserted when he made his own political debut, today is “a time for choosing.”

The choice has never been more momentous.

Matt Kinnaman writes “Getting it Right” every week.

Is hypocrisy Senator Kennedy’s legacy?

A week before he died, Sen. Edward Kennedy sent a letter to Governor Deval Patrick, State Senate President Therese Murray, and House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo asking the Massachusetts legislature to give the governor the authority to fill a US Senate vacancy with an appointee. Most people have heard about the letter. Fewer have actually read it. Here is the salient portion of Sen. Kennedy’s entreaty:

“I am now writing to you about an issue that concerns me deeply — the continuity of representation for Massachusetts should a Senate vacancy occur. In 2004, as you know, the law was changed to provide for a special election to choose a new Senator to serve for the remainder of an unexpired term. The law now mandates that the special election be held 145 to 160 days after a Senate seat becomes vacant. I strongly support that law and the principle that the people should elect their Senator; I also believe it is vital for this Commonwealth to have two voices speaking for the needs of its citizens and two votes in the Senate during the approximately five months between a vacancy and an election. I therefore am writing to urge you to work together to amend the law through the normal legislative process to provide for a temporary gubernatorial appointment until the special election occurs.”

Senator Kennedy’s dying request of the governor and the legislature is plausible. It contains a degree of merit—that is, if there was no historical context overshadowing it. But it’s the historical context that causes the trouble, and that’s why Sen. Kennedy’s plea presents Deval Patrick, Therese Murray, Robert DeLeo, and the entire Beacon Hill establishment with an immediate unwelcome choice of either rebuffing his departing request, or resorting to blatant hypocrisy to fulfill it.

It’s pretty simple. When Beacon Hill Democrats decided in 2004 that Republican Governor Mitt Romney should be stripped of his power to appoint someone to fill a vacant US Senate seat, they were engaged in raw partisan politics designed to prevent Romney from appointing a Republican senator to Sen. John Kerry’s seat if Kerry won the presidency.

Forty-five states allow their governors to appoint congressional replacements. Prior to 2004, Massachusetts was among them. The sole operative reason for changing the law five years ago was that the Democrats who controlled the Massachusetts legislature—and still do—wanted to deprive Governor Romney of his lawful discretion to appoint someone from the opposition party.

Remarkably, in 2006, after Romney announced he was not seeking re-election, and when there was no US Senate vacancy looming, Beacon Hill Democrats nevertheless opposed a bill to reinstitute gubernatorial power to make congressional appointments. Democratic Representative Stephen Tobin argued at the time that “If someone were appointed, they would have had a leg up.” Tobin maintained that a special election is “a much fairer process.” Those arguments carried the day.

In both 2004 and 2006, the Massachusetts legislature decided that the governor should not have the authority to fill a congressional vacancy with an appointee. They offered fine-sounding political and moral certitudes about the right of the citizenry to directly choose their representation, and how an appropriate intervening timeframe allows for a proper civic deliberation prior to a special election. So what changed? Nothing, except that the governor is now a Democrat.

In a world of political honor, the same Beacon Hill Democrats who wanted one thing yesterday and something diametrically opposed today would admit that they are in a moral jam, and they would do the right thing. They would, with all due respect, delay consideration of Sen. Kennedy’s request until after the January 19^th special election, until after Sen. Kennedy’s seat has been filled with the people’s choice, until after they demonstrate that doublespeak and opportunism are not acceptable.

This provides a wise third way, and it would be a greater honor to Sen. Kennedy’s memory than the impulsive and hypocritical action for which Beacon Hill is poised. Then, in a less politically-charged atmosphere, the legislature could make a proper bi-partisan deliberation about whether the law they changed in 2004 for obvious political purposes ought to be changed back, or amended in some other way.

But that approach requires a guiding political conscience, civic maturity, a commitment to public accountability, and a clear sense of right and wrong. Do Beacon Hill Democrats possess these attributes? We’re about to find out.

Things worth thinking twice about

• Global what? Here in the northeast, it’s so cool as we approach the middle of summer that, in some locales, including Pittsfield, we’re on track for the coldest July in weather history. It hasn’t been 90 degrees even once in Pittsfield since June of 2008. And forecasting “models” (Remember those? They’re referenced in countless global warming warnings) are now predicting the snowiest weather in years, with below normal temperatures continuing across the northeast. Sometimes the truth really is inconvenient.

• Didn’t the legislature tell us there was no money left, and we needed to raise the sales tax and suspend the sales tax holiday? Turns out that there’s some money they didn’t tell us about. Hillary Chabot of the Boston Herald blew the lid off their Beacon Hill secret this week—exposing the “reserve fund” of $20 million, used by Massachusetts legislators for food from the 21^st Amendment and other nearby bars and restaurants, along with new rugs, art, and furniture for their offices. According to the Herald, spending by legislators on themselves increased more than 12 percent during—as Democrats love to put it—the “worst economy since the Great Depression.” Governor Patrick has asked House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo and Senate President Therese Murray to use the reserve fund to help pay the states $27 billion budget, but they turned their fellow Democrat down cold.

• Speaking of Governor Patrick, he wasn’t serious, right? When defending the “Bathroom Bill” last week, also known as H1728, the Transgender Rights & Hate Crimes Bill, he didn’t deny that it would grant a man who professes—as one news report put it—an “inner sense” of being a woman, lawful entrance into women’s public restrooms. The Governor assured his state that all will be well. “Somehow we manage at home with bathrooms that don’t have ‘men’ and ‘women’ on them,” said Governor Patrick. “And we can probably figure that out on public spaces, too.”

Probably? No disrespect intended, but is the governor willing to test his theory in his own home? It would only require him to allow a stranger to enter his domicile, and walk right into the master bathroom where a female member of the governor’s family happens to be. Was that what he meant? Like he said, somehow we manage at home. Please let us know how it turns out, Governor, before we make it a law for the rest of us.

Think about it. H1728, which places a high legislative priority on ending some very basic pubic safety societal and cultural agreements, is sponsored by state Senator Ben Downing. Senator Downing, while defending the bill pointed out that in other states which have passed similar legislation all is well, and we can be sure things will go well here, too. Following that logic, can we expect Senator Downing to next endorse an elimination of the Massachusetts income tax, citing the nine other states without one that ran budget surpluses and attracted new population? How long can you hold your breath?

• Is the United Nations in a jam, or what? After using its charmingly named “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” to push the Kyoto Protocol on all the peoples of the world for more than a decade, the UN’s own Food and Agriculture Organization discovered that the earth’s cattle are producing more greenhouse gas emissions around the globe than cars are. Cattle emit most of the “human related”—as the UN put it—nitrous oxide on the planet, a gas with 296 times the “Global Warming Potential” or GWP, of CO2.

It turns out that as people multiply and become more prosperous, they eat more meat and grow more crops, necessitating more cattle, which, like the dirty humans who preceded them in this upward spiral of prosperity, foul the earth and its atmosphere with the messy business of being alive. At least that’s how the “UN News Centre” reported the essence of the story.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that the entire biosphere might be better off if nobody, either animal or human, lived in it.

In conclusion, as we cut our personal spending further to avoid the higher sales taxes pushed on us by the laughing lawmakers downing brews—on our tab—at the bars on Beacon Street, as we ponder the legislature’s other great ideas, and as we assiduously work to reduce our carbon footprints, while simultaneously preparing for the long snowy winter ahead, we might want to think this situation over.

Who’s the real mobster?

Something is happening in American which cannot be easily and honestly dismissed, even though the Left wishes it might. Across the land, thousands of citizens have assembled in countless places—just like the Constitution says they have a right to—to speak up in opposition to President Obama’s insistence on grabbing centralized control of another 17% of the American economy in the name of “reforming health care.”

According to Democratic members of Congress, the White House, and way too many commentators, citizens who refuse to follow the President like happy sheep are members of a “mob,” malcontents financed and organized by right-wing hate groups.

Actually, they are Americans acting in the spirit that Norman Rockwell immortalized in his famous “Freedom of Speech” painting—Americans with something important to say, who embrace as their constitutional and civic duty the opportunity to say it. This is good for free speech, and bad for Obama’s plan to centralize your most personal health decisions under the watchful eye of the federal government.

Maybe there’s an upside. If Obama succeeds, we can look forward to the day when you’ll be able to go to a government-owned bank, and use your government-approved salary to qualify for a loan allowing you to buy a car with a government-approved mpg rating, from a government-owned car company, and drive it straight to a medical clinic to get a government-approved check-up. What’s there not to like?

Apparently, way too much, and that’s why Americans are mobilizing at the grass roots, and showing up to demand accountability from congressmen and women who haven’t even read the legislation they are ready to ram through the economy, and down our throats.

The protesters are vocalizing the nation’s growing realization that America became the most prosperous, powerful, and opportunity-laden nation on earth by allowing its citizens to live lives that are not run by the government. It was a novel idea when it was launched in 1776, and it has succeeded more wildly than the Founders might have even imagined.

When I referred two weeks ago in this column to Obama’s attempted take-over of health care as an act of totalitarian scope, I was greeted in the comments section by thoughtful replies that I didn’t know what I was talking about (my reply: let’s thoughtfully keep arguing it out), and that I equate public policy—any public policy—with communism (my reply: well, not exactly).

I’m open to an honest debate. And amidst the onslaught of mobster allegations from the Obama-Reid-Pelosi axis, one other possibility deserves at least a passing glance. What if, in truth, it’s the White House itself that is engaged in mob-like behavior?

In a communiqué sounding like it was written deep within the bureaucratic bowels of the Ministry of Acceptable Opinion and Enforcement, the following request was disseminated to the American people on August 4 by White House Director of New Media, Macon Philips:

"There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain e-mails or through casual conversation. Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help. If you get an e-mail or see something on the Web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. "

OK, I get it. If someone doesn’t agree that Obama’s health care plan is right for America, maybe it’s the dissenter who isn’t right for America, and we would be doing our patriotic duty to let the White House know.

Now, friends, let me ask you: If George W. Bush’s White House formally attempted to monitor the emails and casual conversations of American citizens to determine whether or not they agreed with his policies, and asked that those who disagreed with the president be reported to the White House via a special email address, would the media and the Left not have gone 100% absolutely off-the-ledge berserk, to the point of demanding his impeachment? We all know the answer. But an even more important point remains.

Americans are supposed to speak up when they disagree with their government. That’s how this whole amazingly beautiful celebration we call freedom got started.

Has anyone reported that to the White House?

Matt Kinnaman’s Getting it Right column is published every week in the Transcript.

The road to health care totalitarianism

On July 28^th, USA Today highlighted an event called “Weight of the Nation,” a presentation sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, revealing the findings from a study by government scientists and the non-profit research group RTI International.

The research has heavy implications. “Americans who are 30 or more pounds over a healthy weight cost the country an estimated $147 billion in weight-related medical bills in 2008, double the amount a decade ago,” says the report. “Obesity now accounts for 9.1% of all medical spending, up from 6.5% in 1998.”

Also this week, the Wall Street Journal released a poll that spells trouble for Obama’s health care reform plan. It looks like Americans—even those who eat too many Twinkies—don’t want it. They’ll want it even less when they discover that, under government-run health care, the national health czar and his troops will have a convenient rationale to monitor the food choices of American citizens, under the guise of “cost control.” But they may not get the chance.

That’s because Obama today finds himself in the same trouble Bill Clinton got into when he tried to engineer a government-run takeover of the entire health insurance system. It’s called overreach. According to the Wall Street Journal poll, only 15% of Americans with private health insurance plans—that’s most Americans—think that Obama’s plan would improve their coverage. Among all respondents, only 2 out of 10 believe that their health care would improve in Obama’s plan is passed.

Congressmen can read these poll results, too, and that’s bad news for Obama. But it’s good news for liberty. Health care “reform” is not just about cost. It’s about freedom. And not just the freedom to choose a plan, a doctor, a treatment, or an elective procedure. It’s about the most basic definition of the freedom of choice.

Obama’s overreaching and overspending has hurt not just his health care plan. It’s also hurting the Democratic Party. The confidence of individual Americans in the Democrat’s ability to reduce the federal deficit has fallen sharply since 2007, while confidence in the Republican Party’s ability to reduce the deficit has remarkably increased. Republicans now lead on this issue. Citizens now trust the Republicans more than Democrats on tax policy, and by a wide margin, to control government spending.

In these three critical categories—reducing the deficit, dealing with taxes, and controlling spending—Americans favored Democrats in 2007. Now, less than seven months into Obama’s presidency, Republicans are in front. The number of Americans who believe that Obama will bring “real change” to the country has dropped from 61% to 51% since the first weeks of his presidency, and an increasing number of voters appear to oppose the “change” that he’s looking for.

The Obama camp knows it has a problem. The president’s uber-adviser David Axelrod spoke 21 words this week that even Republicans can agree with. “People are properly skeptical about any proposals out of Washington that speak to cost because they’ve been singed by past experience.” No kidding.

Consider a September 2008 National Public Radio report. During the height of the presidential contest, the Obama campaign, when asked what his health care plan would cost, offered an estimate of $60 billion a year. Today, based on the projected $1 trillion over ten years cost of the plan, the campaign season estimate has already jumped 67%. The Obama health care plan itself has become morbidly obese.

For Obama, the problem is fundamental. Americans don’t want Washington DC telling them what to do with their health—and more Americans are recognizing that this is exactly what Obama seeks to do. Before long, benignly-packaged government intentions lead to furtive skulks down a path of endless laws, prohibitions, rules, complications, and costs.

American freedom was conceived in an age when nutrition was worse, work was harder, life was shorter, and survival itself was a gift to be cherished. You can bet that the phrases “weight of the nation” and “government-sponsored health care” never passed the Founders’ lips. The Sons of Liberty were not like that.

When the government pays, the government has the say. Maybe people are better off—in some ways—when they’re not overweight, but why should a congressman care if his constituent likes Fritos and he likes soy milk? What happens to liberal tolerance for an endless array of lifestyle choices when it comes to junk food? In an era of government-run health care, that tolerance vanishes.

William Dietz directs the CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity. “Obesity is not a problem that is going to respond to a silver bullet or a single solution,” he said. “Comprehensive policy and environmental changes are needed.” That kind of talk sounds more like totalitarianism than tolerance.

Americans don’t like to live that way.

Matt Kinnaman’s Getting it Right column is published every week in the Transcript.

Thirty-five years later: Nixon still speaks

Tomorrow it will be thirty-five years since the most remarkable presidential speech in history. It is remarkable not for its political impact or policy content, but because of its piercing illumination of common, dark human conditions, its transcending treatment of universal human hopes, and —despite its momentous meaning—its lack of historic status, having been largely lost from our national awareness, hidden beneath the ever-higher mountain of onrushing events.

On August 8, 1974, as his increasingly intense and losing battle against the mounting assault of the Watergate scandal peaked, Richard Nixon appeared before the nation to resign from the presidency. The crisis began two years earlier with what Nixon’s press secretary Ron Zeigler quickly dismissed as “a third-rate burglary,” a break-in carried out by faceless, nameless political rogues and hack operatives who ransacked an office of the Democratic National Committee at its Washington DC office complex located in the Watergate Hotel.

It would not pass quickly. From 1972-74, Nixon’s political water torture proceeded relentlessly. Pit-bull reporting by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein made Watergate a national news story that intensified daily. High-drama nationally-televised hearings in the Senate Caucus Room stripped away Nixon’s professions of innocence. Carefully-orchestrated counter-attempts by Nixon to free his neck from his tightening political and legal noose failed.

The conclusion was inescapable. When the White House—with Nixon’s knowledge—decided early on to cover up the break-in instead of cooperating with its prosecution, a string of crimes multiplied, eventually implicating the President of the United States.

By early August 1974, with impeachment hearings in the House nearing a vote, and with the crumbling of Nixon’s last bastions of Republican congressional support, he realized he was finished, that there was no means left by which to contain or deflect his doom.

The work of Nixon’s life—and the confidence of the nation which re-elected him by an historic landslide only nineteen months earlier—had been destroyed. Nixon, America’s 37th president, addressed the nation from the Oval Office for the 37th time, this time to announce his resignation, effective at noon the following day, August 9th.

On the Friday morning of the 9th, Nixon’s staff packed the East Room of the White House where the president would meet them. Nixon—beaten as no American politician ever had been before, zigzagging now back and forth across the edge of tears as he stood one last time at the presidential podium—spoke from a place of almost incomprehensible defeat. The sweat on his face and the exhaustion in his soul were clearly visible, even transmitted via his generation’s low-def television cameras and screens.

The tension in the East Room that morning was magnified by the sheer singularity of the moment. What does a president say at a time like this? Would he break apart and melt down? Rant and rave? Indulge a third-world style harangue against his opponents and enemies? Embarrass himself and his family, and further embarrass the nation?

He did none of that. Nixon, speaking extemporaneously, chose to cut through the anguish, anger, and blame concentrated in the East Room. Although he was already mummified in an historic political death, Nixon reached out to encourage his family, his staff, and the nation with a profoundly simple and living hope; that no matter what happens there is still another day, with other possibilities.

Speaking of Theodore Roosevelt’s loss of his wife while still in his twenties, Nixon reflected on Roosevelt’s lament that in the face of his grief “the light went from my life forever.” Nixon pursued the thought. “We think sometimes when things happen that don’t go the right way…we think that when someone dear to us dies, we think that when we lose an election, we think that when we suffer a defeat, that all is ended. We think, as T.R. said, that the light had left his life forever. Not true.

“It is only a beginning, always. The young must know it, the old must know it, it must always sustain us. Because the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes when you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes…”

Nixon closed his remarks and his presidency thirty-five years ago with a sentence that is timeless for American politics, and for American life: “Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them back, and then you destroy yourself.”

Bob Woodward called it “one of the great spontaneous moments in history.” And so it remains.

Hug a Nuke, Drill a Well, Save a Tree

Why are we abandoning the energy sources that can save humankind?

Oilman T. Boone Pickens celebrated his own one-year anniversary of abandoning the oil industry that made him rich by abandoning the wind farm he said would deliver us from oil. After spending $60 million on advertising to get the American public on board with “The Pickens Plan” last summer, he apparently discovered it didn’t work.

That was after he ordered 667 GE windmills at a cost of $2 billion, for a 400,000 acre wind farm in Texas. Pickens anticipated that costs would increase to somewhere between $10-12 billion, after which the project, presumably, would have a capacity of 4,000 megawatts, enough to light more than a million homes.

That is, if the wind is blowing, and there’s a grid in place to distribute the electricity, and Congress keeps on redistributing the earnings of American workers to subsidize wind power, which can’t compete economically on its own.

Dr. Arthur B. Robinson, president and research professor at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, is also publisher of Access to Energy, a scientific newsletter focused on energy production, the environment, climate change, and the economic effects of technology policy.

T. Boone Pickens would have saved a lot of money if he had simply paid $35 for a subscription to Access to Energy, and then actually read it. He would have been reminded of what he must already know—“alternative” energy sources don’t work well enough to power human activities, either economically or technologically.

Instead of inundating the airwaves with last year’s Pickens Plan commercials, T. Boone could have done every citizen a huge favor by purchasing gift subscriptions to Access to Energy for everyone. For $10 billion, he could get the newsletter delivered to more than 285 million Americans.

Putting Access to Energy in the hands of this many citizens—93 percent of the total population—would have an overwhelming effect on the American electoral landscape in 2010, after which we would be well on our way to energy abundance, economic recovery, and political rejuvenation.

How and why? Because readers would be awakened to the political charade underway on Capitol Hill, at the White House, and at the G8 Summit, and they would demand that our leaders stop the solar-wind-climate change nonsense, and embrace sensible energy and economic policies.

Consider this scientific analysis published by Dr. Robinson regarding the solar energy array at Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base. Installing the solar array required “$100 million worth of energy of various forms to build.” As Robinson says, “A large portion of this was in the form of actual electrical energy,” which is produced predominantly with carbon-based sources.

You can’t even build or deploy “green” energy without depending on fossil fuels. And even then, the costs aren’t feasibly recoverable. As Robinson explains, with the current maximum output of the Nellis solar array, it will take 50 years to produce enough energy to recoup the original $100 million worth of capital investment.

“In contrast,” writes Robinson, “the Palo Verde (Arizona) nuclear power station…pays back its entire capital investment in 6 years.” Robinson then points out that the predicted lifetime of Palo Verde is 50 years, while the Nellis array is only 30 years. While Palo Verde produces approximately $100 billion in net energy over its 50-year life, the Nellis solar array will never produce any net energy at all, because it is unable to recover its capital costs during its projected 30 year lifespan.

For Americans concerned about open space and environmental stewardship—and that’s nearly all of us—Robinson delivers the knockout punch: “The solar array at Nellis occupies 140 acres. A similar solar array large enough to duplicate the power output of Palo Verde would cover 125,000 acres, or 200 square miles.” The Pickens Plan would have consumed three times that much land. Palo Verde sits on only 6 square miles, and uses only 2.

If I could, I’d pipe Robinson’s voice directly into Pickens’ ear: “Wind power suffers from the same disadvantage as solar—very large capital costs for very small amounts of energy. These boutique methods sound fine during televised speeches, but the only methods that actually produce net energy at reasonable cost are hydrocarbon and nuclear.”

T. Boone Pickens ignored this message and wasted piles of money, underlining how critical it is for the rest of us to listen up, and elect leaders who will promote nuclear and hydrocarbon energy production.

If that happens, it will spark an American economic and political renaissance.