Roy McAlister

I became a conservative when my grandfather had me straighten nails and hammer-harden and sharpen steel tools. He taught me how a conservative appreciates and protects Nature’s wonders, makes birdhouses out of scrap lumber, and prevents soil erosion by building waterways out of river rocks and straw bales. My grandfather was a Flint Hills rancher and often repeated the pioneer’s motto “Make do, do without, or fix it.”

My father taught me how to conserve resources by remanufacturing engines so they would last longer and operate more efficiently than new engines. His maxim was: “We can make it better.” He didn’t want anyone to do without so he was dedicated to repairing things so they were better than new. He farmed and ran an engine machine shop but somehow found time to donate time, materials, and repairs on equipment for churches, small towns, volunteer fire-fighting groups, schools, and to rebuild tornado, fire or flood damaged homes and barns for neighbors.   

It was before self-righteous politicians intent on keeping Americans hooked on oil and liberally spending American’s blood to get it, re-defined “conservative” to mean conserving the power to extend already enormous advantages of oil companies over the middleclass and poor. But sacrificing America’s morals, dignity, and respect to enable oil companies to take Peak Oil Profits can only extend the miseries and increase the inherent insecurity of oil dependence and cannot provide a sustainable economy for Americans or any one else. It will increase wasteful military spending and burn oil faster in the conflicts that are caused by dependence upon fossil fuels.  

In 1966, I realized Civilization depended upon burning over 500,000 years’ of fossil accumulations each year and dedicated my life to development of renewable resources to enable a sustainable economy.  By the time of the Oil Embargo of 1973, America imported about 35% of the oil burned each year and I agonized at the liberal subsidies handed out by lawmakers for depleting America’s remaining oil reserves while we spent the gains of our pioneers to pay for oil dependence. By 1996, we burned far more than a million years’ of fossil accumulations each year.

Pseudo-conservatives have championed liberal waste of finite reserves of coal, oil, natural gas and radioactive fuels. The throwaway society has been promoted against every conservative maxim of our founding fathers and pioneering traditions. By 2003, America imported 65% of the oil burned each year. We surrendered energy security but incurred enormous military expenses by insistent dependence upon imported oil to subsidize Peak Oil Profits.

Being an actual conservative puts me at odds with those who claim to be conservatives but advocate dependence upon burning over one million years’ of fossil accumulations each year.  And I cannot agree with those who advocate liberal waste and pollution of the environment. Lobbyists have succeeded in having lawmakers subsidize central power plants that waste more than two units of fossil or radioactive energy in order to supply only one unit of energy to electricity customers.

I know of and therefore have a moral responsibility to facilitate sustainable energy conversion practices that are at least twice as efficient.  I owe it to my family, my neighbors, and conservative families around the world to not waste the precious resources of this planet. 

As a matter of conscience I am dedicated to conservatism. I am committed to conserving Civilization, which is humans’ most important achievement, and to conserving the environment. Fostering Civilization and conserving our essential environment are immensely important responsibilities that liberal wasters and lawmakers who subsidize wasters refuse to acknowledge.

Being a true conservative puts me at odds with those who forestall if not forsake American energy independence by tax and spend policies to subsidize radioactive and fossil power plants. A conservative cannot endorse willful and risky production of radioactive wastes that will cost society an incalculable amount during the next 200,000 years or more, to inventory, protect, contain, and defend poisonous radioactive wastes. It cannot make America sustainable but our descendants will have the radioactive-waste curse and disdain for hundreds of thousands of years after depletion of radioactive fuels in a few decades. 

As a true conservative I find it reprehensible that radioactive fuels are advocated for uses that will produce enormous inventories of radioactive wastes that must be contained and protected for many thousands of years by armed guards to prevent terrorists from making dirty bombs. To build a radioactive power plant it takes enormous subsidies to hide the costs for huge amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas to mine, refine, form and fabricate the uranium, iron, lead, manganese, chromium, molybdenum, tungsten, titanium, zirconium, and boron from mostly dirt ores along with the mining and fire-calcining of limestone and dolomite to make concrete.           

It is foolhardy to burn fossil fuels now to perhaps get back as much energy in 10 to 30 years of electricity production from central power plants that waste 60 to 80% of their energy. Using depletable fossil fuels to prime such radioactive waste pumps is liberal insanity and cannot be defended if true accounting is used to analyze the sorry economics and high risk involved. Take notes from conservatives who knew a lot about these risks.

"...every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it's important that we get control of this horrible force and try
to eliminate it. . ."  Testimony in 1982 to the U.S Senate by Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy and first all-civilian nuclear power reactor in Shippingport, PA.

"We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society ... nobody really knows if we can do this. Trying to project what will happen in thousands of years or tens of thousands of years, is quite ridiculous."  This is the analysis of Alvin Weinberg, former director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory where plutonium was purified for atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan to end WWII.    

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. Albert Einstein, May 1946

Radioactive wastes are accumulating all over the world. In the U.S., dangerous nuclear wastes from electricity plants, aircraft carriers, submarines, bomb factories, missile decommissioning facilities, and university laboratories are accumulating in 39 states at 131 sites. Two-thirds of the U.S. population lives within 75 miles of one or more of these sites that are all too vulnerable to human mistakes, accidents, and terrorist attacks. Radioactive waste materials now accumulating in the U.S. will emit thousands of times more radiation than was released by Chernobyl and millions of times more than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Nuclear wastes cause very difficult technical challenges.  Radioactive wastes are very risky and expensive problems.

Plutonium is often found in these radioactive wastes. An isotope of plutonium will have half the present radioactivity after 380 thousand years of storage. One millionth of an ounce is enough to cause cancer to humans and all other animals that might come in unprotected contact with it. Virtually every agency that has studied the storage issue is aware that the two sites that were designed to absolutely contain nuclear wastes without leaking for 100 thousand years are indeed already leaking. The Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory and the Hanford Site in Washington are both leaking radioactive substances.

If Abraham would have found radioactive rocks and built reactors and power plants to supply electricity to the yuppies of Sodom, Gomorrah, and other Middle East communities, terrorists with slings hurling burning balls of brimstone mixed with radioactive wastes could have kept the Greeks from advancing democracy and the Romans from building roads to civilize Europe. Some radioactive wastes hurled by terrorists struggling against Egyptian, Greek and Roman imperialism 15,000 to 1,000 years ago could still be about as deadly as they started!  If God wanted radioactive wastes produced on Earth, wouldn’t Abraham have been guided to build nuclear power plants? And the corollary question: Why would Earth be generously provided with far more energy every day from the local thermonuclear-fusion star (but without radioactive wastes) than all the oil energy accumulated during 600-million years?”

It is much more conservative and desirable to more than double energy utilization efficiency and therefore appropriate to oppose production of such wastes and the enormous risks involved. It is far better to sequester carbon and hydrogen from the same fossil fuel inventory that would be required to build a radioactive power plant.  Such sequestered carbon can be utilized to build solar concentrators, wind turbines, wave machines, and instream hydroelectric generators to produce far greater amounts of clean renewable electricity and hydrogen. Sequestered carbon will also be utilized to make lighter and stronger transportation components and countless other durable goods that save energy compared to present products. Priming the Solar Hydrogen Economy pump with sequestered carbon products is far more valuable and conservative than burning fossil fuels to pollute the air and prime the Radioactive Waste Pump. Durable goods made from sequestered carbon can be recycled to make inventions of the future.

Global warming due to fossil dependence was predicted 80 years ago and I sadly realize that Europe’s record heat wave in 2003 killed more than 35,000 persons. This is 19-times the SARS deaths and 10-times the deaths caused by terrorists on 9-11-01. These heat-wave fatalities were because central power plants could not reject enough heat into the environment to enable production of the electricity demanded for cooling the homes of heat-stressed Europeans.

Globally, heat waves have killed more persons than tornados, hurricanes, lightening, and floods combined. All of these weather-related events are exacerbated by carbon dioxide emissions. Vehicles converted to operation on hydrogen instead of gasoline overcome the problem of annually emitting over 2-times the weight of the car as carbon dioxide.

U.S. Geological Survey estimates show that about 3.2 billion barrels of oil could profitably be produced from the Alaskan National Wilderness Refuge (ANWR). This means that oil from ANWR could be extracted and sold for about 200 billion dollars (inflation caused by petrol dependence will eventually make it 300, 400 or 500 billion). Draining ANWR’s oil could enrich 1,000 millionaires with another million or two. You can be sure this is the compelling reason that drilling ANWR is so urgently lobbied by conservatives with liberal donations along with insistent demands for more tax subsidies to pave the way for taking record profits and for avoiding taxes by controlling oil flow to petrol-dependent Americans.  

But ANWR has only three tenths of one percent (0.3%) of global reserves. And you can be sure it will not lower the cost of gasoline for petrol-dependent Americans. Putting a tank on your car that farmers can fill with hydrogen produced by harnessing solar and wind resources or from biomass wastes will solve the supply problem but drilling ANWR cannot. Equipping vehicles and farm equipment to use renewable hydrogen will restore America’s energy security and develop a sustainable economy. 

In addition to doubling energy utilization efficiency for providing heat and electricity to farms, factories and homes, I have tested technology for saving three to ten mpg and enabling converted vehicles to interchangeably utilize renewable hydrogen, methane, fuel alcohols, or return to petrol. Converted vehicles escape the dilemma of petrol dependence, produce more power when needed, last longer, and when running on hydrogen actually clean the air.

America’s strength has always come from ingenuity, long-term investment, hard work, productivity and generosity. Greed-directed militarism to facilitate Peak Oil profits undermines this strength and delays investment and hard work urgently needed to develop sustainable energy security. Fossil and fossil-energy-intensive nuclear power have provided amazing money power for a small percentage of Civilization but it is time to harness much more abundant sustainable energy resources to overcome the 150-year failure of fossil resources to meet most of the world’s needs for sufficient energy to overcome malnutrition, water-borne diseases, and poverty. On November 21, 1864, while struggling through the Civil War to conserve the Union, President Abraham Lincoln (R) warned: “The money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its rule by preying upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is concentrated in a few hands and the Republic will be destroyed.”

We can recover and conserve America’s greatness by doing what is moral and right for everyone and virtually every living thing on Earth. The Solar Hydrogen Civilization is the Grand Plan for overcoming dependence upon depletable fossil and nuclear fuels. Sustainable prosperity without pollution is the reward worthy of unifying cooperation and dedication to renewable resources by every civilized community on Earth.

Please visit American Hydrogen Association at:  http://www.clean-air.org/