Has Lee Iacocca, former CEO of Chrysler, who 5 years ago started building electric cars, become a spokesman for the American Left?

In Where Have All the Leaders Gone? posted on Depression 2 and referenced on the Daily Kos, Iacocca thunders against the mistakes of the Bush Administration, the “do nothing Congress” in session 97 days in 2006 (hey that’s more than 1 day out of 4), the media which sees no evil, speaks no evil, and hears no evil, and the citizens who work, watch tv, and hope they don’t get sick cause of the medical insurance situation.

Excerpt: Where Have All the Leaders Gone? By Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney

“Had Enough? Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.” Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out! You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for.”

What’s next? Will Jack Welch build wind turbines? Will an oil company build solar panels? (Wait a minute GE is building wind turbines and is using Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” to advertise them. British Petroleum is building solar panels. I can feel the paradigm shifting.)

NPR’s Marketplace broadcast Nuclear Power Redux on March 27, 2007, a predictable piece on nuclear power. Marketplace interviewed an industry spokesman, a business lobbyist who said “It’s ok, we only worry sometimes,” and a environmental activist who used to work for the nuclear industry but became disillusioned when she realized that nuclear power is “a crappy way to boil water.”

The industry spokesman repeated the same tired old fallacies about solar and wind power “that there is insufficient capacity to make a meaningful difference. Marketplace didn’t challenge him, but he’s wrong. Just about any house in New Jersey can be retrofitted with enough solar panels to meet its needs for electricity and hot water. Similarly, much of the power needs for single family homes in every state, except Washington and Oregon, could be met through solar power.

Solar panels don’t produce power or hot water at night. That’s where wind power comes in. VestasGeneral Electric and Airtricity built and installed on the Arklow Bank of Ireland, if installed in sufficient number off the coast of New Jersey, could also take care of much of the state’s power needs. If installed along the Gulf Coast, up the Atlantic Seaboard, along the Pacific, in the Great Plains, in West Texas, wind power could provide much of the nation’s electricity needs.harnesses the wind to produce 33% of Denmark’s electricity. Today. The kind of wind turbines that

Solar and wind provide power with no pollution: no greenhouse gases, no mercury, no radioactive wastes. There is no fuel so there are no fuel costs. No mines, no mills, no wells, no spills. Unlike nuclear, evacuation plans and extraordinary security measures are not necesssary. There are none of the external costs that are associated with nuclear, coal, or oil.

Land based wind costs about $1.5 million per megawatt of generating capacity, offshore wind costs about $3.5 million per mw, rooftop solar costs about $7 per watt, $7 million per mw. At $6 Billion for a 1,167 mw plant, Watts Barr cost about $5 million per mw. So when you look at the hard costs to build, forgetting the externalities and the massive government subsidies for nuclear power, the technologies cost the same.

When you factor in those externalities: the costs of safety, security, waste management, and fuel for nuclear, versus practically nothing for wind and solar; when you factor in the 23 years to build Watts Barr versus a few months to build the Arklow bank wind facility; you realize that wind and solar can be brought on line faster and cheaper and without the kinds of public relations challenges or government subsidies nuclear requires.

So what’s the best answer for tomorrow’s power needs today? The answers, to juxtapose Bob Dylan and Otis Redding, are Sittin’ in the morning sun

andBlowin’ in the wind.