Teabags and Reality

Screams from the "Cap and trade", and "National Energy Tax", buffoons are answered in this opinion piece in today's Danville Register & Bee.

Critics of Congressman Tom Perriello would do well to read this opinion piece and then do a little research. Listening to people like Bradley Rees, Danny Marshall or Virgil Goode is a bit like drinking sterno.

But anyone who thinks Perriello — a man who has worked in this community’s soup kitchens — would blindly support a bill that would add hundreds or even thousands of dollars to our energy bills just doesn’t know our congressman. No member of Congress would vote to do that.

Part of this bill addresses concerns over global warming and mankind’s role in climate change. Even if you’re not convinced that that’s a problem, developing new green energy technologies will at least free us from the petroleum prison we’ve inhabited for the past century.

“We have had an oil dependence probably since the day I was born, and I think this bill is going to be a big winner for Central and Southside Virginia. For biofuel, for our farmers,” Perriello said this week.

What Perriello’s critics don’t mention is that some of those projects have already started — bio fuel projects in Pittsylvania and Henry counties, just to name two. At nearby Hyco Lake, Progress Energy has just finished spending $800 million to cut emissions to comply with the 2002 North Carolina Clean Smokestacks Act. Is anyone in favor of dirty air?

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which apparently believes Perriello can be defeated in 2010, won’t mention those local projects — or all the research and development around the country that’s quickly turning alternative energy into the stuff of mainstream energy. The group smells political blood, and it is willing to scare people with high cost estimates and talk of a “national energy tax.”

But there is no national energy tax — just a lot of wildly fluctuating cost estimates that don’t take into account all the new ideas, technologies and products that can be used to solve our energy problems.

It took a lot of political courage — and guts — for Perriello to support a bill that’s so widely misunderstood. Maybe voting to give money to NASA in 1962 cost some congressmen their jobs, too.

Speaking of Rees, Marshall and Goode, they were at a "Tea Party" in Danville yesterday. It's amusing to me that Rees, a Congressional hopeful and a blue collar worker, was probably the more coherent of the three. There are times I believe Marshall and Goode are both afflicted with Mad Cow disease.