Many politicians, media outlets, and large corporations are heavily promoting green energy and solar and wind energy as replacements for fossil fuels. Western governments are trying to pick winners and are subsidizing wind and solar energy to the tune of billions.
What’s really going on here?
Solar and wind energy can be useful. But generally only for special applications or remote locations where regular power is uneconomic or unavailable. Wind and solar make no sense for mass power generation, however. They’re completely unsuitable for a complex industrial economy.
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The Greens aren’t trying to solve a technological problem but make an ideological statement. Which is fine, except they’re doing it at the public’s expense. Meanwhile, the public has been so propagandized that they now feel it’s morally righteous to be hornswoggled.
No problem if someone feels that covering his rooftop with solar panels can cut his electricity bill and pay back the cost in 7 or 10 years—which is roughly the case today. It’s something else entirely if a government puts a society’s electrical grid at risk in order to virtue signal.
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Alternative Energy Options
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for alternative methods of generating energy. Geothermal can work in places like Iceland, where near-surface magma hotspots currently generate around 30% of their electricity.
Tidal power works in certain locations. As does hydro, although it’s increasingly unpopular because dams inundate a lot of land, silt up, displace the locals, destroy existing fauna and flora, and eventually collapse.
It’s a fact solar tech has been improving for decades. For instance, there’s been an annual 3000KM race across Australia for solar cars since 1987. They’re still basically experimental toys, but they get faster every year. Still, it’s only possible in a place like the Australian desert where the sun is usable 12 hours a day, every day. Any kid who’s played in the sun with a magnifying glass can tell you solar power is real—but that doesn’t mean that it’s suitable for base-load power in an industrial civilization.
Someday we may use gigantic collectors in high earth orbit to capture the sun’s power and beam it down to earth by microwave. But that’s for the future.
Nuclear Power
So-called “green” technologies will continue developing and getting cheaper. Excellent. But progress will be much faster if entrepreneurs make the necessary decisions for economic reasons rather than bureaucrats for political reasons.
Coal and natural gas still make sense for mass power generation, but the real answer is nuclear in today’s world. It’s by far the safest, cheapest, and cleanest form of power generation. And it would be far safer, cleaner, and cheaper if only it wasn’t treated as such a bugaboo. We’d now be using very small, foolproof, ultra-cheap, self-contained thorium-powered nuclear plants if it wasn’t for the obstructionism of the Greens and their allies.
Unfortunately, governments everywhere, driven by uninformed and misinformed public opinion, are trying to make solar and wind the exclusive sources of power.
Public Opinion and the Green Movement
Public opinion is shaped by leftists. They have almost completely captured academia, the mass media, celebrities, corporate boards, and other centers of influence. It’s perverse that coal and natural gas are being made artificially uneconomic because they have to be stopped and restarted constantly during times when so-called alternative energy can’t generate adequate power.
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A good case can be made that the whole green movement is actually insane. I’m not at all convinced they’re even well-intended. These people are like poisonous watermelons, green on the outside, red on the inside.
Electric Vehicles
Governments also heavily subsidize electric vehicles (EVs). Absent this intervention in the market, would EVs be economical? Will EVs ever be able to exist without government support?
Speaking as a lifelong car driver, I like the idea of electric vehicles (EVs)-although I think hybrids are the way of the future.
EVs low center of gravity means they tend to handle much better than cars with internal combustion engines (ICE). They can accelerate faster and achieve speeds just as high as ICE cars. They have only a fraction of the moving parts of standard cars. And battery technology keeps improving; even now, you can get 300, 400 miles, or more of range. At least when it’s not too hot or cold out.
The main problem with EVs at the moment is that they can be inconvenient to charge. But there’s a much bigger problem on the way.
If the world goes to EVs in a big way—which they want to do—the grid won’t be able to handle all the power needed to run them.
The transmission capacity doesn’t exist, and new high voltage lines are a real NIMBY issue. That’s entirely apart from the fact that the main baseline power simply won’t be there in a world of wind and solar. Innovation, technology, and capital accumulation can solve those problems.
But in the kind of highly regulated and highly taxed world that the Greens advocate, we’ll have constant blackouts and higher costs.
Net-Zero and the Economy
People are afraid that fossil fuels are going to run out, but they won’t. The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, nor will the fossil fuel age end because we run out of hydrocarbons.
If technology is free to develop, better forms of power will appear. In the meantime, the answer is nuclear and fossil fuels, of which there are hundreds of years of supply left. In the meantime, subsidized “green” or “alternative” power isn’t the answer.
If something needs a subsidy, it’s because it’s uneconomic. And if something is uneconomic, it means you’re destroying capital, not building capital. You’re making the world poorer, and poor countries have a hard time making technological advances.
The Future of Energy
Electric vehicles have a great future, but both the grid and power plants will have to evolve greatly to make them viable on a big scale. They shouldn’t be legislated into existence, which is what’s happening now. The result will be another major crisis.
Many people think they are absolving their alleged climate sins by using EVs, promoting solar and wind energy, and demonizing fossil fuels.
Are these things really as “green” as the average person thinks they are? No.
Greenism is a sham and a delusion. It’s an example of a meme that has spread not because it’s true—it’s not—but because the public feels that “everybody” believes it, and therefore it must be true.
People who know nothing about basic chemistry, physics, or science, in general, think magic can happen. It’s really like a religion that way. They confuse scientism with science, much the way they confuse Marxism with economics.
In summary, while solar and wind have niche applications, they are unsuitable for mass power generation and are being promoted for ideological rather than practical reasons.
The push for Net Zero emissions is an impossible and economically ruinous goal that will lead to massive government overreach and economic decline. Individuals should stay informed but recognize the difficulty of changing the current course of green policies.
