Opinion: Fossil fuels have gotten us where we are — but renewables are the future
Utah is fabulously rich with solar, geothermal, wind and storage energy potential. Our electric utilities are flocking toward renewables, but our state legislature passed the incredibly backward SB97 and HB301 while having blocked forward-looking bills such as SB211, SB249 and HJR11. Why?
Am I for putting people employed in oil drilling out of work? No. Geothermal energy is like fracking but without the fracking. In getting the heat out, there’s no need to shatter the subsurface of our one and only home, and there’s no need to take already sequestered carbon out of the ground, put it into our atmosphere, and then pay to sequester it out of our atmosphere.
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Our objective isn’t to crash the fossil carbon energy economy. (See “Romney has a plan that is pro-business and pro-climate,” Deseret News, March 3.) Consider an airliner headed toward Salt Lake International Airport and over Denver. The objective is a soft landing. Better get started on that descent now for a soft landing. That is what I’d like to see for fossil carbon energy. It’s gotten us to where we are, thank you, and now let’s have renewables take us from here to prosperity.
Charles Ashurst
Logan
