Who Needs Energy?
Tucker, William
"Who Needs Energy?" published a piece entitled "Friends of Enron Launch Vicious Ad Attack on Daschle." (Why oh why couldn't this have appeared in Rolling Stone?) The piece's lead is so absolutely perfect that I...
...Abolish corporate welfare so that Fortune 500 firms don't spend half their energy and public relations budgets farming Washing-ton...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MARCH/APRIL 2002 - (` World Trade Center to light up anymore, who needs electricity...
...who represents Riverkeeper and runs an environmental law clinic at Pace University...
...I wouldn't mind a pipeline under the Hudson...
...These "numerous ties" consisted of Lay's aforementioned talk at a Club for Growth conference...
...If there's any sane lesson that Congress should take away from the Enron political scandal (and this is assuredly both a corporate and political scandal), it is not that we need campaign finance reform—it is that we need federal spending reform...
...Offered as a Public Service...
...In the village of Buchanan, where the Indian Point plant is located, concerns were minimal...
...Enron was the ultimate Washington gold digger, always lustily seeking some "fair advantage" from a government pro-gram or policy...
...The spent rods are far more radioactive than the reactors themselves, and pose a much greater threat.Yet because of environmentalists' success in delaying the disposal of nuclear waste, there is no chance they will be removed for at least a decade...
...I just want that plant shut," he announced...
...Thus, it wasn't long before environmentalists in the Hudson Valley were beating the drums to close down Indian Point, the nation's oldest commercial nuclear reactor...
...Anti-nuclear activists have had a fieldday ridiculing this effort...
...The horrible irony is that Indian Point and every other nuclear facility in the country do have one huge vulnerability—the tons and tons of spent nuclear fuel rods lying relatively unprotected in swimming-pool-type facilities, awaiting transport to the proposed national nuclear repository atYucca Mountain, in the desert north of Las Vegas...
...With 8100 billion of corporate loot divvied up by Congress every year, the wonder is that there aren't 100 Enrons out there, with tentacles into every law firm, media outlet and congressional office in the District of Columbia...
...Almost the whole state of Nevada is opposing that one...
...In the weeks after September 11, rumors abounded...
...And defense-less...
...Even though doing this would almost guarantee Bush's reelection—to say nothing of helping rebalance the budget...
...As my Cato Institute colleague Jerry Taylor, one ofWashington's premier regulation analysts, has pointed out, Enron was the furthest thing from a proponent of the free market's invisible hand for energy and electricity policy The company participated in nearly every cockeyed subsidy scheme Congress ever invented...
...Why in the world would Enron have wanted to fund The Club for Growth or me personally given our anti-big-government and anti-corporate-welfare stands...
...If the American Airlines Flight 11 that flew down the Hudson River had, instead of hitting the Twin Towers in New York, banked left and instead hit the twin towers of Indian Point, we would have a much more dire situation than we're facing now," said Robert F Kennedy Jr...
...Unfortunately, terminating the pipeline at Indian Point would mean gas won't reach New York City, where thousands of residential customers are hoping it will lower their heating bills...
...Indian Point still provides 8 percent of NewYork State's electricity and up to 30 percent of New York City's...
...Any semi-witted fact checker could have discovered that it was Daschle, not us, who was on the Enron gravy train over the years...
...BY WILLIAM TUCKER Leave it to the greens to look for a way to recycle a nation-al tragedy into ammunition for another round of baseless fear-mongering...
...This was manifestly untrue...
...But why not...
...They know it's run well...
...National Guards-men were assigned to defend the plant and the Coast Guard cordoned off the outlying waters, making it difficult for fuel barges to re-supply Albany...
...The group claiming responsibility for the ads calls itself The Club for Growth" And here's the kicker: "The well-financed Club for Growth, little known to the public, has numerous ties to Enron and Lay...
...You can either have a nuclear bomb in your back yard, or you can conserve a little energy...
...It would also cut supplies to several proposed electrical plants in the city...
...Daschle's political team picked up on the story, because the next week "South Dakotans for Daschle" started running TV ads attacking the Club for Growth as a shill for Enron...
...If Mujahideen could shoot down Soviet transports with shoulder-launched SAM missiles, why not put a few in the hands of National Guardsmen...
...I'd say support for keeping it open is around 100 percent," said Mayor Ed Donahue, who is serving his fifth term in office...
...Within two months, Hudson River-keeper filed a petition asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to shut down the two Indian Point reactors, originally built by Con Ed but now owned by Entergy Corporation of Alabama...
...Entergy took out a series of newspaper advertisements pointing out that closing the plant would cause rolling blackouts and raise electrical rates up to 40 percent...
...Environmentalists zeroed in on Westchester County's evacuation plan, which is sup-posed to ensure the orderly exodus of 40,000 people from a 10-mile radius...
...Only then would fire sirens and radio announcements alert the citizenry...
...The Westchester Journal News weighed in with a screaming head-line, "20 Million at Risk from Terror Attack by Air...
...People at the center of a problem usually keep their heads...
...Columbia Gas Transmission, the 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MARCH/APRIL 2002 RATIO NABESTSELLER Ask for it at your favorite bookseller...
...THE AMERICAN ONE YEAR=$39 CALL 1-800-5 ' -3" OR SUBS RIB Di' aJ V WW (,.1 ' ' L'JJW builder, hopes to lure them back after approval...
...As usual, the degree of panic varied inversely with actual exposure to real danger...
...People look at is just as if it were another GM or IBM plant...
...It's those at the periphery who panic...
...Environmentalists looked at the wreckage of the World Trade Center and saw a message dear to their hearts: Close down nuclear power plants...
...The ads are meant to terrify voters into submission over the White House economic and energy plans, plans largely dictated, we now know, by Kenneth Lay...
...Nationwide, nuclear power accounts for 20 percent...
...I think it's an open-and-shut case...
...When Indian Point 2 went offline for a few months in 2000, electricity prices climbed 25 per-cent," says Steve Sullivan, communicationsdirector for the Independent System Operator, which oversees New York's wholesale markets...
...One ostensibly serious suggestion came from Paul Leventhal, founder of the Nuclear Control Institute, a Washington anti-proliferation group...
...In November, Entergy announced plans to install eight gas turbines that would provide 360 MW of peaking power to cover New York's growing summer shortfall...
...It was a regular purchaser of seats on the late Clinton Commerce Department Secretary Ron Brown's famous trade missions around the globe...
...Indefensible...
...The piece's lead is so absolutely perfect that I couldn't have penned it better myself: "In a sudden sneak attack, the friends of Enron and its deposed C.E.O...
...Who wants air conditioning, anyway...
...And of course it provides a lot of jobs and pays a lot of our taxes" Sociologists actually have a name for this—the "donut effect...
...But oops for the past 40 years, Riverkeeper and its co-conspirators at Scenic Hudson and the Natural Resources Defense Council have opposed every power plant proposed for the Hudson Valley...
...Con Ed has provided gas to homes in Westchester since the 1920s.The gas terminal has been in Mt.Vernon for 40 years...
...Delightful to read"— Columbus Dispatch Watch Booknotes on C-SPAN Sundays at 8 pm and 11 pm ET...
...Procedures call for local officials to keep any incident under wraps for an hour or more until buses have evacuated schoolchildren from the area...
...None of which intruded on the panic scare-mongering fun...
...State officials have proudly mailed out emergency instruction booklets, along with a refrigerator magnet that says, "I have placed my Planning for Emergency booklet...
...Kennedy conceded that New York and Westchester might have difficulty getting through next summer without Indian Point's 2,000 MW but said the power could come from elsewhere...
...Created by Cable...
...There is not one damned customer [for the pipeline] in Westchester County," complained County Executive Andrew Spano, who is leading the opposition...
...Six Ryder trucks and two Pakistani men were said to be loose on the plant grounds...
...One thing is certain: Although the country has learned to work together for defense against terrorism, when it comes to dealing with day-to-day needs for energy, it's still every environmentalist for himself...
...This is a shame, because in the event of a radioactive-gas release, the best strategy would be to hole up in a quiet basement for a few days until the cloud blew over...
...Now let's get serious for a moment here...
...Frogmen had invaded across the Hudson River...
...Then again, that may not do much for the nerves of passing air travelers...
...The theory that The Club for Growth was being paid by Enron to attack Senator Daschle was always half-baked...
...11 has given anti-nuke campaigners a sense of purpose not felt since that other great icon of anti-nuclear history, the Great Socialist Triumph in 1986 at Chernobyl...
...But Andrew Cuomo, who is running for governor, announced he didn't even want his three daughters taking the pills...
...Citizens are instructed not to turn to page 4 for evacuation instructions until the sirens sound...
...Enron received cash, loan and insurance transfusions from Uncle Sam via such Washington-to-Fortune-500 slush fund programs as the Export-Import Bank and the Over-seas Private Investment Corp...
...Kenneth Lay have begun running vicious personal television attack ads against Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle...
...Of course they'd been saying this for 25 years, even before the non-tragedy at Three Mile Island...
...You're being facetious, I presume," says Kaplowitz...
...Want to get rid of corporate political corruption...
...Oh, my...
...fill in the blank...
...If you took both reactors out of action, the effects might be geometric.You'd also increase the chances of an outage from one incident every 10 years to one every two...
...And this time with a wonderful new twist: Any one of America's more than 100 nuclear reactors—no matter how well-designed or maintained or run—might be the next target of a terrorists' attack...
...Scheduled eponymously for completion in 2000, the pipeline project has been delayed so long that its Canadian suppliers have pulled out...
...Long-time Muslim residents were fleeing the community in anticipation of an attack...
...But Sept...
...The latest roadblock is the city of Mt.Vernon, which claims the pipeline rep-resents "environmental racism," because it would connect to a Con Edison gas terminal in the largely black city...
...MARCH/APRIL 2002 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 25...
...That'll probably happen the day the Olympics installs fair and impartial judges at skating events...
...But, hey, without a Contributing editor William Tucker wrote "Horror On the Hudson" in T4SJanuary/February 2002...
...In a real emergency, of course, everyone would just high-tail it, clogging local roads to a standstill...
...To top it off,Westchester County is up in arms against the Millennium Pipeline, which would bring Canadian natural gas to the NewYork area...
...The one lesson I've learned from my 20-year experience in Washington is that corporate America is perhaps a bigger adversary to small government and the free market than even Tom Daschle...
...Which is to say never...
...Just to prove he hasn't gone soft on Corporate America, however, Kaplowitz is opposing the eight currently proposed gas turbines...
...As for me, I will continue to chase down those corporate dollars—probably futilely I'm not a shill for companies like Enron...
...My over-riding fear is Indian Point," says Kaplowitz...
...The solution lies at the airports, not the plants," said Ralph Beedle of the Nuclear Energy Institute...
...Three Democratic congressmen and several Democratic members of the NewYork State Legislature joined the press conference...
...Of course, while trying to shut down nuclear power, environmentalists are no more receptive than ever to other forms of energy...
...Environmentalists erupted, proclaiming that mixing natural gas and nuclear power would lead to who-knows-what...
...Apparently trying to fuel even greater public fears, Leventhal insisted that the federal government should install surface-to-air missiles around each of the country's nuclear installations, to shoot down incoming terrorists...
...The Iruclear industry scoffed...
...Republicans, and specifically the Bush administration—which, of course, had a particularly cozy relationship with Enron—could go a long way toward defusing the Enron crisis by calling for abolition of the Commerce Department, the Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank and other CEO feeding troughs...
...Westchester officials have convinced the Homeland Security Office to distribute 1.2 million potassium iodide pills to prevent thyroid cancer, standard planning for nuclear emergencies just what you'd want, in fact, if you were in Manhattan when a "dirty" terrorist bomb aboard a ship in the harbor went off, covering the city in radioactive dust...
...One of the few opponents at least willing to admit there might be some contradiction in trying to close Indian Point and block the pipeline is Democratic county legislator Michael Kaplowitz...
...I'm still just a wannabe...
...Just another example of suburban elitists indulging their paranoia at the expense of urban minorities...
...He wants to terminate the pipeline across the river in Rockland County, then pump enough gas under the Hudson to serve a 2000-MW gas-fired generator that would replace Indian Point's nukes...
...WHO NEEDS ENERGY...
...The plan—as nearly everyone agrees—is as much of a fairy tale as any official plan for catastrophic unnatural disasters in or around major cities...
...And perhaps there are...
Vol. 35 • March 2002 • No. 2
