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Revelation: Wind and Solar Energy Are Just Unnecessary

The news coming out of the science world regarding the breakthrough in fusion is exciting. The ability to have a sustaining clean energy source has been a part of science research for at least the last 60 years. But missed in the discussion is its true importance – that the movements towards wind and solar energy (“wse”) are just a waste.

The drawbacks and costs of using wse to produce low carbon energy are well known.  They are expensive, unreliable, and environmentally damaging (using toxic metals, huge amounts of space, etc). Use of wse will diminish global economies by trillions of dollars hurting poor people and countries most of all. And in the end, even under the most austere de-carbonization policies, the effects on actual temperature reduction will only be a fraction of a degree.

But we have been told that in order to have any chance of saving the planet by reducing CO2, , we must go in this direction. In other words, if climate change is an existential threat, there’s nothing else we can do — we have to do it or else the world will be destroyed. Right?

Wrong. How stupid are we all going to feel if we spend the next decades destroying economies worldwide through unsound green policies only to discover that cold fusion (or some other non carbon energy source) made those policies just useless!

At the start of the twentieth century. New York City thought it was going to be destroyed by horse manure. Indeed, in 1898, the first international urban-planning conference took place in the city. It only lasted three days instead of ten, because no one in attendance could come up with a viable solution to the massive, growing amount of horse manure that was produced in the city. At the time, roughly 100,000 horses created 2.5 million pounds per day of manure. NYC was not the only city facing such a problem. Just a few years earlier, the Time of London carried an article in which its author forecasted that in “50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure.”

But the manure problem was solved not by efficient waste removal policies – it was solved by the automobile. No one anticipated that the cure for the manure was not horse-related; it was a new invention. All the time and energy spent fixing the manure problem was all for naught. 

Perhaps it’s not worth going through all this green policy, expending trillions of dollars and upending economies, if in 10-15 years we have cold fusion or another non-carbon energy source. Human ingenuity has always been the source of the solutions. Fossil fuels itself was the solution to inefficient energy sources of its day. Wouldn’t it be that much more rational to spend money on new energy sources instead of wse? Bjorn Lomborg, among many others, have been advocating this for years.

 Nuclear fusion, the combining of hydrogen atoms to produce tremendous amounts of clean energy, is the real solution for the green movement.  

Less Government, More Free Trade

A recent article in the WSJ, “Is the U.S. Moving On From Free Trade? Industrial Policy Comes Full Circle” should have ultimately been an Op-Ed because it was a baseless attack on the concept of free-trade.  It starts out okay, pointing out that free markets, free trade and globalization have been the bedrock of a healthy US economy, especially since WWII. But then the author ignorantly blathers on and ultimately concludes that globalization based on neoclassical free-trade doctrine is wrong. 

After World War II, government spending (military, etc.) dried up overnight. But it was a free-market, non-coercive environment at the time that allowed private investment to flourish and more than make up for the decline in government spending. What we currently have is a problem caused by runaway government spending. Government spending wholeheartedly crowds out private spending, substituting inefficient political and crony-based spending for free-market, give-the-public-what-they-want spending.

Likewise, economically stupid policies like tariffs against China were instituted and have yet to be repealed. Tariffs clearly and consistently hurt the consumer and taxpayer by driving costs up to everybody in amounts far in excess of any benefits given to those crony beneficiary companies. They don’t strengthen American manufacturers; it is cronyism of the highest order. 

One of the most important takeaways from the COVID affair is the clear evidence of how critically important free markets are. While the free market developed workarounds for providing necessities and developing relevant new products, the government couldn’t get out of its own way in terms of what it was trying to do, while an overabundance of regulations hampered its responsiveness.

Trying to suggest that more government intervention in the economy is the solution and not the problem clearly is economically ignorant.