Quick Hits: Risk Exposure A-OK and Lunsford Has a Plan
Terri Whitehouse July 24th, 2008
Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao is pushing to loosen occupational health and safety regulations. Quoth Adam Finkel, a former health standards director OSHA:
It’s an insult to America’s workers for the Department of Labor to be spending its time in the last year of this administration allegedly fine-tuning the details of how to do these regulations when, other than the one ordered by a court, they have issued no major worker-health regulations…there’s a great need to light a fire under this moribund agency to do something — anything — to protect workers.
U.S. Senate candidate Bruce Lunsford has unveiled a plan, and it involves more than beating on his chest and saying, “DRILL!”
- 2008 KY U.S. Senate Race , Bruce Lunsford , Ditch Mitch , Elaine Chao , Energy Industry , Mitch McConnell , Oil
- Comments(1)
Bruce Lunsford plan is a plan not of innovation, but the status quo. Relying on fossil fuel as an energy policy is the wrong direction to take our country. We need to separate ourselves from using fossil fuel and grow independently into the world of using renewable energy that is not in the future. Renewable technology is the here and now. Mr. Lunsford does get it right with wanting to release the SPR. When Bill Clinton release the SPR in the 1990s the price of gas decreased by 10% in about 4 months, this is something that is long overdue. When Mr. Lunsford talks about stopping the oil speculators on the New York Merchant Exchange is dead on, according to Harry C. Johnson, a former banker and who worked many years inside Big Oil and ran is own small company in Oklahoma, said “some industry experts, who profit greatly from the high price of crude, and have stated openly that the worldwide economic price of crude, absent speculators, would be around $50 to $60 per barrel.” This is a huge step that needs to be taken, but these policies are only to be implemented while we transition to use renewable energy.
Former Vice President Al Gore recently spoke at Netroots Nation National Convention and challenged Americans to wean itself off of using fossil fuel to using wind, solar, and other earth friendly energies sources. This strategy is not only the right thing to do for the environment and our pockets books, but also for foreign policy. Right now the environment is in serious peril with the continued global warming crisis. By emitting carbon into the atmosphere at the current rate that we are doing right now we are only causing more damage to the environment and expediting harder storms, more hurricanes, erosion, floods, and famine.
Al Gore urges to the switch of every kilowatt of electricity from fossil fuels to renewable energy by 100% in the next 10 years. This would cost America 1.5 to 3 trillion dollars. It is actually a bargain if you look at the fact that we spend 800 billion dollars a year transporting oil from other nations to ours. The money used to produce renewable energy will pay for itself many times over. There is a community in Switzerland that is the first city in the world to have everything inside of the small village to be made of renewable energy. It cost a person only 10 thousand dollars a year to live comfortably.
By switching to use renewable energy we will be looked at around the world as a beacon of hope for every nation. We will no longer be in a stranglehold from OPEC nations and Big Oil corporations to conform to what they want.
Democrats of Kentucky need to stand up to leaders in our state and tell them that we want something different for our state and our country. We need to urge the representative of our state to support this measure. The only to have a reliable energy policy is to have renewable energy. The sun is not going out for billions of years to come. There is an unlimited resource that we have yet to tap into. I urge you to e-mail Bruce at info@bruce2008.com and tell him that to accept Al Gore challenge of 100% of our electricity to be renewable energy in the next 10 years. For Al Gore full speech you can find it here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-gore/a-generational-challenge_b_113359.html