“Now, clean energy breakthroughs will only translate into clean
energy jobs if businesses know there will be a market for what
they’re selling. So tonight, I challenge you to join me in setting
a new goal: by 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from
clean energy sources. Some folks want wind and solar. Others want
nuclear, clean coal, and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will
need them all - and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work
together to make it happen.”
Folks, you are being treated like infants. While you are being
robbed. Windmills and solar panels are not ‘innovative’, they exist
only because some politicians have made icons of them and are
wedded to the things as a result. Meaning so are all of us. But
wind-powered electricity was commercialized in 1891. Solar cells
were patented in 1888.
The modern solar cell was created in 1954. Jimmy Carter vowed to
increase their subsidies in 1978, supported by
promises that it would provide 20% of our electricity by 2000. It
is still a fraction of one percent. Soooo close! And solar
gets three pitches in the 2011 State of the Union address as some
breakthrough waiting to happen. Sigh.
Coal-fired electricity was commercialized in 1882. Somehow it’s
a dinosaur and the others are new. Please.
Windmills and solar cells to produce electricity are precisely,
for all intents and purposes, as old or ‘new’ as coal-fired
electricity, and as the automobile. Two of those four have
succeeded spectacularly. And as a result are under assault by
people who hate abundance, automobility, and otherwise freedom from
reliance on them.
Those other two are dismal failures that cannot find markets and
investors in a nation where the Snuggie and Vince the Sham-Wow guy
did. That’s pathetic. And they and their enablers in Washington and
state capitols snivel that they are ‘innovative’, just around the
corner, ‘new technology’ and ‘nascent’ and therefore need welfare
because otherwise they’ll go bankrupt.
The answer to that drivel is not only that you’re not new and
being new does not in any way mean you therefore need welfare, but
also: then go bankrupt. Because the rest of the sentence
they didn’t tell you is that they’ll go bankrupt even if you
do give them that wealth transfer. Just a little later.
Until you give them their next one. They got bugs crawlin’ in their
skin, man, can’t you see? They can stop any time they want but,
just a taste, man, just a taste!
Windmills aren’t Sputnik, as he implies. They aren’t ‘big
things’, as goes his closing line (unless you have to live near
them…ask a Kennedy if there’s one at your viewing party).
They aren’t the internet, as he also risibly analogizes. The
internet made people more efficient, allowed them to do more, to
create more wealth with less. Windmills and solar panels are the
opposite. They are woefully inefficient, are inherently less
economic, would not exist but-for politicians deigning it be so,
and in any other way do not deserve being in the same conversation
with actual innovation like Silicon Valley’s. Except that if we had
forced Silicon Valley to run on more expensive less reliable less
efficient energy like that to which it is being analogized, it
would have happened somewhere else.
Which brings me to something a colleague of mine says, made only
more relevant by the current White House: do not despair, there
will always be an America. It’s just that it may have moved to
Asia.
