Friday, January 21, 2011

In The Land Of Old Ideas, Walker Kills Another Green Project

Add the Madison biomass fuel project to the cancelled state high-speed rail segment and the once-promising wind turbine industry.

The pattern is brazenly obvious - - a true throwback to the early 1970's, Walker favors fossil fuels over cleaner alternatives, thus boosting out-dated technologies and entrenched corporate interests.

And these same groups will get more help from the Walker administration as it deregulates environmental protections at the DNR.

The realtors, the highway lobby, the home builders and the fossil fuel sector have the keys to the castle.

Wisconsin is now the land of old ideas.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another good move. Biomass energy is just another fancy name for burning wood which is about as old as technology can get. For some reason, someone thinks that there is a lot of free waste wood just laying around ripe for the picking. Anyone familiar with the timber industry can tell you that the collection and transportation costs will make this very cost prohibitive even if you could get the wood for free.

Joshua Skolnick said...

@Anonymous. Aren't there collection and distribution costs for coal and oil, which all originate outside of Wisconsin? What about the $3 trillion for Iraq and Afghanistan? Is that not a cost for oil?

And there are a lot of other plant and animal biomass materials besides wood: corn stems and husks, prairie grasses, weeds, leaves, yard waste, paper products, cooking by-products, etc. Many of these are produced locally, unlike coal and oil, and are renewable.

Must "Conservatives" constantly be apologists for non-renewable fossil energy?