More Beck Babble: Wind power needs nukes to work
By David Neiwert Tuesday Mar 31, 2009 3:30pm
Just to be a jerk, Glenn Beck yesterday used his show to demonstrate -- like a number of his fellow right-wingers -- his utter contempt for Earth Hour: running his klieg lights at full blast to show how much energy he could waste. Yeah, that's the kind of responsible rhetoric we need more of. Whatever.
But the really special moment in the broadcast came when he started talking about wind power as an alternative form of energy with Tom Borelli of the "Free Enterprise Action Fund" -- a right-wing anti-environmental outfit -- about the Obama energy plan, and this burst out:
Beck: You can't make wind energy work without nuclear energy as well. Wind stops --
Borelli: You know that, but Congress doesn't know that.
Beck: Use your common sense! Hey America! Use common sense here! Let just try this out!
Wind, when it blows, makes energy. When it stops, you can't store it, so what's making the energy? Wind energy doesn't work without something else making energy for when the wind stops, which it does -- especially if Al Gore controls the temperature, and all the winds and everything else, so we never have blowy days!
Agh!
The problem with Beck is that he packs so much ignorance and misinformation into a single rant that it's hard to figure out where to start. Suffice to say that one can easily find out that there are numerous strategies for dealing with the unreliability of wind power:
