Mark Mill’s had an excellent piece recently in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Biden’s Not-So-Clean Energy Transition.” In it, he lays out the hidden costs and pitfalls of Biden’s energy plans, a sentiment shared by the International Energy Agency (IEA) 287 page report on clean minerals.
The green and clean energy movement is a perfect example of Bastiat’s “seen and unseen.” Everyone says that clean energy, such as wind and solar, is clean and the cost of energy is zero, so how can you have anything better than that? What is seen are windmills and solar panels but what is unseen is what it takes to get there.
When talking about fossil fuels, opponents often focus on the externalities: they are bad for the environment, they produce large amounts of carbon dioxide, etc. But the externalities of wind and solar power are much bigger. For instance, you need rare earths and critical minerals for solar power, the panels have high replacement and repair costs, you need fossil fuel backup, and so forth. All of these unavoidable costs, however, are not factored in. The lowly windmill is even worse. You need excessive amounts of plastic and cement. They kill large numbers of birds and other animals. They require large tracts of land. The noise, the marine life, the visibilities are all “unseen” factors that are not considered when touting the clean energy “zero cost. But windmill externalities are actually so important and big enough that if we were to ramp up using windmills as a power source past 10%, it would completely change the landscape and maybe even the economy.
Mill’s synopsis is a good summary of the IEA report, showing the geopolitical dangers and the current lack of industries and infrastructures required to make the change to clean energy. Biden and others on the left would do well to brush up on their Bastiat and consider the “unseen” consequences of their energy plan.
