Jay Inslee Quotes
We could never light another match, and if China continues to build one coal-fired power plant a week, we are doomed. China is going to have to have new technologies made available to it to stop this. They're not going to live in poverty.
Inslee, Jay. Interview by David Roberts. Grist, Grist Magazine, 4 Dec. 2007.
Lott, like many other reasonably intelligent people who understood little about technology, did not realize that all the early efforts with a technology are relatively primitive and even the best ideas have to be engineered to scale and cost efficiency. A decade later, solar energy had become a significant industry in the work and the United States, which had invented many of the early technologies had lost the international lead in Solar Energy to Germany and China. The ultimate value of any technology cannot be judged by the initial technological efforts.
Energy conservation requires chnge and sacrifice in the short term while fracking has few short term difficulties and requires the vast majority of American to do nothing. The extent of medium and long term damages that fracking will cause is yet unknown and is made even more difficult to know by the practice of the oil drilling companies of keeping the chemicals, amounts, and procedures the use for fracking secret.
His assertion that wind energy is less expensive than the fossil fuel alternative is not accurate if one accounts for the costs on the basis of conventional accounting methods. It was at that time more expensive which is why it’s use was limited. However, the existing methods of accounting did not charge the fossil fuels for the environmental degregation that they cause and the cost to society to overcome these or live with them. More important there is no charge to the cost of fossil fuels for the deleterious health effects that their extraction and use cause. Global warming / climate change is not considered at all in the economic analysis.
As a member of the Crow Tribe living on the Montana Crow Reservation, she recieved, alomg with all other tribal members, about $225 every quarter for the royalty payments that a commercal coal mining company paid on the coar that they mined on the Crow land. The demand for coal had been steadily decreasing for over a decade since coal was the worst of the fossil fules in terms of polluting the air and emitting greenhouse gases increasing the global warming. With the Fracking technology, oil had become much less expensive as was natural gas, making coal not only the dirtiest fuel for producing electricity but one of the most expensive whereas in the past it had been the least expensive. The Montana Crow Reservation was econmically destitute, with no industry, very little agriculture, and littel else to help the local economy other than the royalty payments for coal mining. In other parts of the country otehr Indian nations were giving up economic benefits that came from enviornmentally damaging commercial activity and there was some pressure on teh Crow nation to close the reservation to coal mining. Ms. Ten Bear Reed's quotation illustrated the great dilemma that she, the Crow, other Indian tribes and general citizens all over the country. For decades many areas of the country had been in economic recession, and poverty was endemic. The royalties from coal mining, oil drilling, pipeline right of way and other commecial activities that did or potentially threatened the enviornment was in many cases the only cash families and tribes recieved or it was a large proportion of their income. The moral dilemma was profound when there were chilren to feed and care for. it was much harder for the poor to be environmentally conscious than for people who were economivally better off.
Jay Robert Inslee is an American politician who has served as the 23rd governor of Washington since 2013. A member of the Democratic Party, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993 to 1995 and again from 1999 to 2012, and was a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
