One of my favorite quotes retorting the “We can’t drill our way out” of our energy problems came from Dennis Miller a few weeks ago, who retorted, “We can’t ceiling fan our way out of it either.”

In principle, I’m all for anyone who thinks they have a solution or who thinks we should diversify our energy sources. But like it or not nuclear, oil and coal (all the things Democrats block) offer the most bang for the buck, especially nuclear.

Take, for example, oil magnate T. Boone Pickens’ suggestion that our Midwest could become the “Saudi Arabia” of wind power and “20% of America’s electricity can come from wind.” Sounds great, and Mr. Pickens is putting a lot of money into his project.

But that’s where the pie in the sky ends.

First political problem (the usual one): the environmental extremists will block any serious attempt to create a massive wind farm project. Kills birds.

[Heartland Institute] Between four and five million birds are killed every year in collisions with stationary, generally solitary, communications towers. One can conservatively estimate that three times as many wind turbines will cause three times as many bird deaths: between 12 and 15 million.

A wind turbine with long, rotating blades (regardless of whether those blades have been slowed) clearly will kill more birds than a smaller, stationary communications tower. A 295-foot tall wind turbine can be viewed as a “communications tower” with an additional bird-killing surface area of 21,113 square feet. That is an area almost half the size of a football field.

Catalogue that in your file labeled, “Bet you didn’t know wind farms were more environmentally damaging than drilling in ANWR.”

Next problem (as stated above): No bang for the buck, or, “Damn, that’s a lot of windmills.”

[William Tucker, National Review {$}] Pound for pound, coal contains twice as much energy as wood, and gasoline and natural gas contain four times as much. The Industrial Revolution became possible only when these denser forms of solar energy were developed.

Now, as we begin to run up against the natural limits of fossil fuels, it is important to consider the energy density of anything we might use in their place. Wind, water, biofuels, and the direct use of sunlight are anywhere from 5 to 50 times more dilute than fossil fuels. There is only one way to compensate for their low density, and that is to consume huge amounts of land in gathering them.

This is the Achilles heel of every form of “alternative energy.” When first introduced in the 1970s, alternative energy came with the slogan “Small is beautiful.” Prophets such as Amory Lovins, David Brower, and Lester Brown pictured a post-industrial world of backyard windmills, rooftop solar collects, and organic gardens where small plots would be set aside for biofuels that would run hyper-efficient cars. Self-sufficiency was the theme. It all sounded charming and romantic.

The reality has been anything but. We now use one-quarter of America’s corn crop for biofuels in order to replace less than 4 percent of our oil. GreenFuel Technologies, a Massachusetts startup, has a plan to grow photosynthesizing algae that will consume the carbon emissions from coal plants, and can be turned into biodiesel to run cars. It sounds like a great idea, except that the pools required for gathering sunlight to convert 40 percent of the exhausts from a single power plant will occupy 15 square miles.

Third problem: N.I.M.B.Y. (Not in my back yard)

[Heartland Institute] The Department of Energy’s “Wind Energy Initiative” calls for obtaining 5 percent of our nation’s electricity from wind turbines by the year 2020. To meet that goal will require the planting of more than 132,000 new wind turbines—a figure three times greater than the number of existing communication towers in the U.S.

Remember, the 132,000 windmills estimate comes from a 5% plan. So, trying to get 20% as Pickens suggests would logically require four times that 132,000 windmill figure.

Continues Tucker:

A standard wind farm built to generate 1,000 MW — the capacity of an average coal or nuclear plant — would occupy about 125 square miles. [T. Boone] Pickens wants to space his windmills a little wider — five to the square mile instead of eight — so for his 4,000 MW he will need 800 square miles.

But that 4,000 MW is only the “nameplate capacity.” Because wind blows so irregularly, even the best wind farms now generate electricity at only 30 percent of their theoretical capacity. (By contrast, nuclear reactors run at 92 percent capacity.) That means he will need 1,200 square miles of windmills to equal the output of three or four coal or nuclear plants, each of which occupies only a square mile. Factoring in the land required for mining adds several square miles for coal, and much less for uranium.

…If Pickens’s dream is realized, you will probably be able to drive from Texas to North Dakota without ever being out of sight of a windmill — just as they are visible everywhere in western Denmark. The one oasis may be Pickens’s own 68,000-acre property in the Texas panhandle. “I’m not going to have the windmills on my ranch,” he told Fast Company. “They’re ugly.”

Oh, there’s one more rub. Bringing windmills online will require building a whole new cross-country transmission system. While wind energy is concentrated in the Midwest, consumer demand is mostly on the East and West Coasts. Normal transmission lines — of 138 kilovolts (kV) and 345 kV — lose about 10 to 15 percent of their wattage every 1,000 miles, which is not a problem when the power is generated close to the consumer. But transmitting electricity halfway across the country will require a completely new infrastructure of 765 kV lines that cover long distances without losing power. This could be an enormous problem, because utility executives now say the only thing more difficult than siting a power plant is building new transmission lines, since every property owner and municipal jurisdiction in the path gets to have a say. Ranchers who are as just as picky as Pickens about what they permit on their land could pose huge obstacles.

So, let’s summarize — environmentalists will block it anyway, nobody wants their landscape littered with windmills, and it’s not cost effective.

Yeah, not sounding like such a hot idea anymore, is it.

That’s probably why, Tucker cites, “over the last decade, grid operators in Denmark, Japan, and Ireland have all refused to accept more wind energy” and “Denmark — the world leader in wind generation — stopped building windmills altogether in 2007.”

Meanwhile, as I’ve noted before, we ironically have an energy policy that is far more radically left-wing than France (which gets a whopping 80% of its electricity from nuclear power).

[Tucker] The energy released from splitting a uranium atom is 2 million times greater than the energy released by breaking a carbon-hydrogen bond in coal.

The tremendous energy density in uranium produces an extraordinarily smaller environmental footprint. It explains why uranium can be mined at a few isolated sites, while coal must be extracted by digging whole cities underground or ripping the tops off mountains, as is being done in West Virginia. It explains why a 1,000 MW coal plant must be fed by a 110-car coal train arriving every day, while a nuclear reactor is refueled by a single tractor-trailer delivering a batch of new fuel rods once every 18 months. It explains why France can take all the waste from 25 years of producing 75 percent of its electricity with nuclear reactors and store it beneath the floor of one room at La Hague. The incredible energy density in the nucleus of the atom is the greatest environmental benefaction ever bestowed upon humanity.

The solution to our electrical generating problem (which might in turn power cars) seems obvious. But don’t expect anything but more “China Syndrome” hysteria from the left.

From the Washington Post (hardly a “Big Oil” sponsored rag):

* Drilling is pointless because the United States has only 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves. This is a misleading because it refers only to known oil reserves. According to the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS), while there are an estimated 18 billion barrels of oil in the off-limits portions of the OCS, those estimates were made using old data from now-outdated seismic equipment. In the case of the Atlantic Ocean, the data were collected before Congress imposed a moratorium on offshore drilling in 1981. In 1987, the MMS estimated that there were 9 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. By 2006, after major advances in seismic technology and deepwater drilling techniques, the MMS resource estimate for that area had ballooned to 45 billion barrels. In short, there could be much more oil under the sea than previously known. The demand for energy is going up, not down. And for a long time, even as alternative sources of energy are developed, more oil will be needed.

* The oil companies aren’t using the leases they already have. According to the MMS, there were 7,457 active leases as of June 8. Of those, only 1,877 were classified as “producing.” As we pointed out in a previous editorial, the five leases that have made up the Shell Perdido project off Galveston since 1996 are not classified as producing. Only when it starts pumping the equivalent of an estimated 130,000 barrels of oil a day at the end of the decade will it be deemed “active.” Since 1996, Shell has paid rent on the leases; filed and had approved numerous reports with the MMS, including an environmentally sensitive resource development plan and an oil spill recovery plan that is subject to unannounced practice runs by the MMS; drilled several wells to explore the area at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars; and started constructing the necessary infrastructure to bring the oil to market. The notion that oil companies are just sitting on oil leases is a myth. With oil prices still above $100 a barrel, that charge never made sense.

* Drilling is environmentally dangerous. Opposition to offshore drilling goes back to 1969, when 80,000 barrels of oil from an offshore oil well blowout washed up on the beaches of Santa Barbara. In 1971, the Interior Department instituted a host of reporting requirements (such as the resource development and oil spill recovery plans mentioned above) and stringent safety measures. Chief among them is a requirement for each well to have an automatic shut-off valve beneath the ocean floor that can also be operated manually. According to the MMS, between 1993 and 2007, there were 651 spills of all sizes at OCS facilities (in federal waters three miles or more offshore) that released 47,800 barrels of oil. With 7.5 billion barrels of oil produced in that time, that equates to 1 barrel of oil spilled per 156,900 barrels produced. That’s not to minimize the danger. But no form of energy is perfect or without trade-offs. Besides, if it is acceptable to drill in the Caspian Sea and in developing countries such as Nigeria where environmental concerns are equally important, it’s hard to explain why the United States should rule out drilling off its own coasts.

I will take exception to two other myths that this same Post editorial actually perpetuates: that drilling now would make no impact on the price of oil, and that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is — yawn, there’s that word again — “pristine” and should not be drilled (which is an odd argument for them to make considering their third point).

Regarding price, it dropped immediately after President Bush announced the repeal of an executive order banning offshore drilling. Besides, if the oft demonized speculators can drive up the price of oil due to forecasting production shortages, then they can drive the price of oil down once production ramps up! This isn’t brain surgery, it’s Economics 101.

Finally, Google ANWR and “pristine” and tell me it’s not the most scripted and intellectually dishonest combination in Internet history. House Republican John Boehner’s recent trip to ANWR exposed this fallacy. As Boehner’s site mentions, the area proposed for drilling – which is proven oil reserves – is 3 square miles out of a 19 billion square mile area.