Green Energy, Blackouts, California and France

Pat's latest post, Nuke the damn windmills!, has excerpts from William Tucker at the American Spectator. Tucker talks about how California poured huge amounts of money into "green" technologies that did not pay off, and how that lead to California's engery crisis (the brown-outs and rolling-blackout of the '90's), and it's current high energy costs and floundering economy. It was one of the big reasons we left California.

Now, the Democrat's Stimulus plan is taking the entire nation down the same path that California has gone. Aarrgh!

It's worth reading the article just for that, but there was also this tidbit about France, which I found fascinating:

[...] Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that France, unlike the rest of the world, has not yet fallen into a recession. The reporter attributed this to France's high level of government employment, but a much more likely explanation is France's complete conversion to nuclear energy. With 80 percent of its electricity coming from nuclear and the rest from hydro, France pays the lowest electrical rates in Europe -- and has the lowest carbon emissions on top of that. [...]

I can be quite critical of the French sometimes, but when they do something right, it's worth taking notice of it and learning from their worthy example.

Authentic American environmentalists would be advocating following France's example in this. Instead, I fear the leaders of the American Environmental Movement are really just "watermellons": green on the outside, red on the inside. They don't want to see us solve our energy problems, they just want to sabotage our current economy and system of government, making it unworkable, so they can then replace it with something else.

On energy matters, I would take the French way over the California way any day. The French way is demonstrably workable; it has a track record of success. The California way is Pie in the Sky; we've seen the results of that.

How long will it be before our government in Washington D.C. gets a clue?