Letter: Push to be carbon free is nonsensical

To the Editor:

Legislation recently signed into law will keep the Byron and Dresden nuclear plants operating for the next five years, costing rate-payers $694 millions. Additionally, the unreliable wind and solar will cost rate-payers $350 millions a year. Over five years, it will cost $1.75 billion.

This maniacal push to be carbon-free, of course, is nonsensical. Recent wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, droughts, etc., are normal weather occurrences. The hyped-up anthropological climate change hoax obscures the fact about the lack of real infrastructure development over the last 50 years. Meanwhile, populations have grown where they never were before. President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better is more a maintenance budget rather than an advanced infrastructure platform. For example, the drought in the West and parts of the Midwest could have been managed if the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), proposed by Parsons Engineering in the 1960s, was built.

There is no climate emergency, only Chicken Little screaming that the sky is falling. The Chicken Little in this case is the great reset Davos billionaires, whose casino economy is hopelessly bankrupt. Their plan is to create a newer, larger, even more unsustainable financial bubble, the Green New Deal.

Legislators realized that the fantasy of carbon-free energy without nuclear was just that, fantasy. While setting unrealistic short-, medium- and long-term carbon-free goals, they appeased those who see climate change as dogma. The need to adjust or abandon these goals may slap sense into them when the reality of collapsing agriculture, industry and, as a result, population awakens them, and if not, we haven’t seen anything yet. Better to keep the existing nuclear fleet operating and develop advanced nuclear reactors by supporting the recently announced program at the U. of I.

Inefficient, unreliable, costly wind and solar have their place, but not as a replacement for safe, affordable, reliable baseload capacity.

Nicholas C. Kockler

Woodstock