6h · Perseverance Showed That Nuclear Engine Is Best for Space MissionsFeb. 22 (EIRNS)—NASA’s Perseverance rover which touched down on Mars on Feb. 18, some 203 days after its launch from Cape Canaveral, is powered by a kind of space nuclear power system, the Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG), which was developed in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The World Nuclear Association’s Director General Sama Bilbao y León welcomed this pers… See MoreLikeCommentShare
Wieczorek Independent For Congress 6h · Stay-Behind Enrons in TexasFeb. 22 (EIRNS)—In emergency meetings on Feb. 21 of Texas legislators and state officials, the environmentalist Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner—who is also a funded possession of Sir Michael Bloomberg and his “Beyond Coal”—made a widely publicized and idiotic suggestion that the state pay the multithousand-dollar February electric bills issued by the distribution companies. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) just as foolishly agreed with this. Texas’ deregulated power distributors showed themselves orders of magnitude better at speedy delivery of bills than of electricity; these ranged from $7,000 to $17,000 for the month’s electricity. So those who didn’t lose their power would lose their shirts.The PUC, more sensibly, put forward a moratorium on cutoffs due to these bills. But what the state should do is make the distribution companies eat this month’s bills, as being tantamount to failure to provide electricity. If any of them fails as a result, take them over and run them as public utilities, looking for opportunities to sell them to power generation utilities at low purchase cost.Who are these deregulated little Enrons? One is Oncor, which used to be TXU Electric Delivery. It, along with TXU Power (now Luminant), was created in 2007 by three Wall Street sharks of electricity deregulation: Goldman Sachs, KKR, and TPG Capital. It has been looting retail power customers in the region since. Being a leveraged buyout, TXU’s successor went routinely into bankruptcy a few years later and then re-emerged as Texas Competitive Electric Holdings, now called Vistra, with the same Oncor and Luminant sub-predators.A second distributor is cheerfully named Griddy, and according to a Feb. 20 story in Newsweek (dated Feb. 21), it magically had bills out for payment by Feb. 18 of up to $10,000, to customers whose power had somehow stayed on through the disastrous three days Feb. 15-17.A third robber is likely going bankrupt. This is Just Energy, which is a retail electricity distributor whose main business is “renewable energy options and carbon offsets” (it also speculates in natural gas futures). A sort of “Windron” or “Sunron.” It lost $250 million in a hurry last week and announced it was not likely to remain a going concern.So the wild speculation which accompanied the electricity deregulation wave 20 years ago—exposed and fought across the country by Lyndon LaRouche—also accompanied the “environmental” powerplays by billionaires like Warren Buffett and T. Boone Pickens, who have pushed wind power all over the West and Southwest. This “green finance” is worse than mere financial speculation: It is Malthusian population reduction, exposed by the LaRouche movement’s “Great Leap Backward” Special Report
The Great Leap Backward: LaRouche Exposes the Green New Deal (larouchepub.com)
