Twenty two years ago, on this day, April 30, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney has a fever dream in Toronto calling for 1300 new power stations
In an April 30 speech, Cheney said that the U.S. needs to build at least 1,300 electric power plants (averaging 300 megawatts) between now and 2020, “more than one new plant per week.” Cheney downplayed the potential for energy efficiency and renewable energy sources – suggesting that conservation is just “a sign of personal virtue” and that relying on renewables would threaten “our way of life.”
http://www.nirs.org/alternatives/1300powerplants.htm
[This gets him in trouble, he bravely sends out his wife Lynne the next day to “clarify.” He can’t do it himself because of ‘laryngitis’]
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 374ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the de facto Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, says that he wants 1000 new coal fired power stations. This is an echo of Nixon’s project independence in 1974, which Cheney will have been well aware of, since Cheney had been serving in the Nixon White House at this point. The context was that Cheney’s puppet George Bush had announced that he was not going to continue negotiations around ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, in effect, they thought, killing it. That wasn’t the case, because the Russians eventually signed but I’m getting ahead of myself.
What I think we can learn from this
Old white men don’t learn. And they have visions of power, in both the literal and metaphorical sense, to be grand numbers, “look at my works, ye mighty and despair.” And the way that these visions are promulgated loudly and long, is partly designed to demonstrate to them and their supporters, their power, but also to demoralise those awful environmentalists who believe that – and this is the heresy – there are limits to what humans both should and indeed can do to the planet without serious consequences.
What happened next
Cheney’s vision of 1000 power stations did as well as his vision of Iraq as a peaceful American dependency full of grateful Iraqis (*)
(* or maybe we should not take his public pronouncements as evidence of naivete, but rather a willingness to lie…)
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.