LOONEY’S TUNE
7-27-11

Pardon the pun but a recent letter to the editor here by Mark Looney made me do it. He used the tragedy of Japan ’s Fukushima nuclear disaster to justify his opposition to Congressman Chris Gibson’s proposal to build the world’s best nuclear power plant here in NY. That’s like suggesting we stop building new state-of-the-art bridges here after the collapse of a 40-year-old bridge in Minneapolis .

Mr. Looney suggested that he believes the residents of our 20^th Congressional District prefer wind, solar, tidal and thermal energy sources. Yeh, and the people of the Mojave Desert will gladly trade the solar power they generate for an equivalent value of Hudson River water packed in by camel. Barring the discovery of a practical superconductor, there is no way that any or all of these sources will power the entire country.

Mr. Looney stated: “The world is running out of oil now” with the same conviction reminiscent of Jimmy Carter when he predicted the world supply of oil would run out by 1990.

Mr. Looney went on to decry fracing (which he misspelled as fracking) of natural gas although it has a proven record of being safe, clean and economical. New York has the largest deposits of shale gas in the country and shale gas is expected to make up half of all natural gas production by 2020. Our known nationwide reserves are enough to meet the consumption demands of the entire country for the next 100 years.

Mr. Looney continued with the dire revelation that we are in the evacuation path of the Yankee nuclear plant in Vermont . Now that’s a scary thought - when Vermont gets hit with an earthquake and tidal wave our roads will look like the exodus of a Grateful Dead concert.

Mr. Looney’s manifesto ended with an attack on energy corporations for being “narrow-minded” and “self-interested”. Maybe he hasn’t heard about G.E. getting away with paying no taxes in exchange for their collaboration with President Obama on his green jobs and energy boondoggle. He’s probably been too busy watching Captain Planet cartoon reruns.

David Crawmer