WHY DID YOU GET UP THIS MORNING?

But of course, these windmills would have to be manufactured from wood, metal, fiberglass, or whatever and that takes energy. Where would it come from?

From longwall mining, among other things. Don't try to fathom the depths of this wonderboy; we are all crazy, but he is sane. His estimates for energy investments were in error by a cool two trillion dollars; as for windmills, he has recently disputed that his fantastic figure of 100,000 windmills in Denmark in 1900 is an error, and we must admit that he is right: It seems not so much an error a.s a deliberate misrepresentation. We judge so after reading the material made available by Dr P.L. Olgard, which is interesting both for the wonderboy's mode of operation and for the influence he wields with the press - it covers up for him.*

But never mind Lovins' personality; how about his claim that it its ridiculous to heat a nuclear core to millions of degrees in order to heat a house to 68 degrees? The statement is false, for there is no place even at the very center of a fuel rod where the temperature exceeds a few thousand degrees, but in Lovins' writings it is never worth quibbling about a few hundred trillion here or there.

Nor is the real point that a President of the United States repeats this idiotic statement in public, keeping the error in and botching his units in addition. ("Millions of degrees of heat" said the man who appointed Andrew Young ambassador 2 millivolts ago.)

The real point is that before people are coerced into other methods of getting their energy, perhaps some thought should be given to the reasons why they voluntarily choose to have it distributed in the form of electricity rather than carrying it on their backs as coal or other fuel.

It is, in any cases quite easy to make up statements of equally shallow demagoguery. Why get up in the morning when you have to lie down again 17 hours later? Why does a plane leave the ground in San Francisco when it only comes down again in New York? Why give a letter to the Post Office here when they will only deliver it there?

Well, the Post Office is gradually solving the last problem the Lovinsian way. Let everybody write his own letters to himself.

* We believe Dr Olgard will send the material to interested readers on request. Write to him at Dept. of Electrophysics, Bldg.332, Technical University of Denmark, DK 2800 Lyngby, Denmark.