Fox Business viewers got an up close and personal look at how utterly stupid Doug Burgum is about solar. I suppose he could just be lying to them but liars on Fox Biz??? Perish the thought.
During a discussion with Stuart Varney about the heat wave blanketing the east, he complained, “We’ve had times during the last couple of days where, in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars this country spent on wind, we only had like 1% or 2% of the electricity being generated by wind.”
Oh. Well, actually, wind is 5 percent of energy generation but only 2 percent of energy consumption. And those numbers vary depending on where one lives. It’s hard to imagine wind farms just outside of Washington, DC, so yeah. Low percentage. In fact, there are some wind farms offshore and onshore in nearby states, but none serving DC. Yet.
Turning to solar, he said, “And then of course when the sun goes down, you have a catastrophic failure called sunset and there’s no solar energy produced and yet we’re subsidizing these things that are intermittent, unreliable and expensive.”
Um, excuse me??? A catastrophic failure called sunset? Yes, he is that dumb. Apparently he thinks China has found a way to keep the sun up 24/7 or something, since they’re producing enough energy between solar and wind to supply all of Turkey or Indonesia now.
I hate to break it to Doug, but there are these things called batteries which store the solar energy inside them for when the sun goes down so there are no failures after sunset. You can see small versions of this on security cameras and garden lights. It’s actually a thing and would take stress off the grid. My personal dream has been to have solar panels which power my whole house with battery storage that would enable me to be off the grid entirely. Doug would like that dream to die, however.
The real issue here is that Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act subsidized renewable energy sources and the gas and oil industry did not like that one bit. So we have the Secretary of the Interior on Fox Business lying to viewers about the capacity for solar energy because he plans to release public lands for oil drilling and needs to justify that.
Oil and gas companies are the tobacco companies of this decade. They’re intent on wrecking the planet and killing as many of us as possible.
Also, he says “nucular.” That should be a crime unto itself.
h/t Aaron Rupar
