Citizen Power

Ken Salazar was a one-term senator from Colorado when he was nominated to be the  Interior Secretary by President Obama.  I remember at the time there was a lot of trepidation from people on the left that he wouldn’t be “progressive” enough as the new secretary.   It doesn’t make any difference to me whether he’s a “conservative” Democrat or not as long as he does a good job protecting the environment.

The Interior Department secretary is a very important job for the environment — it oversees energy resources, natural resources, drilling for fossil fuels on public lands, and oversees the country’s parks and wilderness areas.   Salazar has turned out to be very good so far, protecting a lot of wilderness in many states and showing he cares very much for the environment, as someone in this position should.  There is a good article in Rolling Stone about the accomplishments and viewpoints of Salazar so far that is definitely worth reading.  He’s not afraid to stand up to the big energy companies either, something that was completely lacking during the Bush administration.

Shortly after taking the job, Salazar canceled  77 oil and gas leases Bush authorized near Utah’s national parks, including ones that would have put oil wells in eyesight of major landmarks in the parks.  Can you imagine going to a national park and seeing oil wells nearby?  I would much rather see windmills in the distance, if anything.  Salazar also delayed the rush into offshore drilling and he said a big “NO”  to Bush’s plan for oil-shale mining in the Rocky Mountains.  Salazar’s already proven himself to be worthy of the job of Interior Secretary.

Now he has gone a step further than many expected and is declaring that wind power is serious and big enough to take over for coal plants. And not even all windmills but just the ones in the east!  So if we can replace all of our coal plants with just “Eastern” wind, we can probably replace oil and gas with the windmills that we have sprouting up all across this country.   According to Salazar, this will include windmills that are in the ocean, off the coast.  There are plans for thousands of these offshore windmills some day.   All across the country windmill farms are popping up all over the place.  The idea that our government thinks wind power has as much potential, and will be as powerful and far-reaching as coal energy is very good news.  We can put windmills in even more remote areas once we get the smart grid built which will carry the power to more cities and towns.

Naturally, people in the coal industry think he is being “too optimistic”.  This country, and the human race, never got anywhere without being too optimistic.  Think of every major human achievement and it took a huge amount of chutzpa or “over-optimism” or cojones, or whatever you want to call it.  Our energy problems demand that we think big, maybe even think impossible.

You can read more details about Salazar’s remarks today here .

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