Zephyr Teachout Quotes
It's a lot harder to push forward things, like energy policy. There's a big dream out there about wind and solar power.
Teachout, Zephyr. Interview by Brandon Stosuy. "Zephyr Teachout on the Art of Politics." The Creative Independent, Kickstarter PBC, 2017.
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.
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.
He was speaking from retirement. When he was Prime Minister--2001-2005, and active politically, he was in favor of nuclear power for Japan. But after the meltdown of the reactors at Fukishima, he saw happening exactly what the corporation executives running the nuclear power told him could never happen. He aslo supported the claims of American Sailor who had provided much help in the nuclear emergency that they were suffering from deseases brought on by teh excessibe radiation that they encountered.
Statement when Chile built the first large scale Solar Powered Electric Generating facility in one of its deserts. The cost of electricity was less than half of that of the then existing generation with carbon based fuels like oil or natural gas, It was a major breakthrough bacuase while solor power was always clean and infinte, it had been more expensive to generate than carbon based power sources. The consinuous improvement in the solar collecting techno;ogy, the large scale of the Chlean facility and the terrific desert location combined to not only make solor power less expsnsive, but much less expensive than fossil fuels.
Zephyr Rain Teachout is an American attorney, author, political candidate, and associate professor of law at Fordham University.
