“All this stuff works on a chalkboard, but does it work in practice?” That ought to be the first question anyone asks an academic or some hoity-toity expert when they propose some radical new theory.
At the University of Chicago, the joke is, “It works in practice but does it work in theory?”
We like to make fun of California because it is run by dolts. Really dumb people. Gavin Newsome sounds smart. So did his predecessors. But, the fact is they have never really done anything in their lives so they have no wisdom or worldly experience to lean on. They outsource everything to the bureaucrats and the bureaucrats only exist to grab more power.
My friend Roger Simon wrote about the elites today in his email opinion piece. He says we need a new word for them.
George Bernard Shaw used to call them MIRC (Members of the Idle Rich Class) back around 1900, but the Irish playwright, perhaps because he was a type of socialist, couldn’t see into the future, our time, when many of these “elites” are anything but “idle.”
In fact, in my view, they are too busy. In actuality, their use of their “eliteness” (not a word) has been used to justify all manner of actions and opinions with negative results on society about which they willfully mislead us for their own purposes. That makes almost all “elites” hypocrites, “media elites” perhaps most of all. But that word still doesn’t encompass everything necessary.
The noxious term “elite” has been used to characterize people in all aspects of society—media, entertainment, business, finance, academia, science (where in some cases it might apply) and so forth.
What I see is people on the left are “elites”. People on the right are characterized as fascists. That’s because we on the right look at what works in practice instead of theory.
Covid policy is a perfect example of that. I still see people walk around with masks on their faces today despite reams of scientific and practical evidence that they do not work. Neither does the shot from Pfizer. Don’t call it a vaccine because it’s not.
When we look at the power grid, the elites run the show. This has to stop. If I were President, one of my first actions would be to do a President Mileil on the Department of Energy. The DOE is a poorly planned Jimmy Carter relic. Ol Jimmy is in the bottom ten when it comes to the performance of all-time American Presidents, bless his heart.
California has brownouts all the time. Planned power shutdowns. This is the 21st Century after all. Instead of progressing, we are regressing. In Germany, the bureaucrats decided to kill the natural gas industry and embrace fully green energy. Citizens bought fireplaces and cut down trees for wood.
When the fires happened a few years ago in California, the bureaucrats couldn’t accept responsibility for mismanaging the land. Instead, they sued the power company.
James Madison knew as much and wrote about it in Federalist 48. Those old white guys knew something about how humans were hard-wired.
The conclusion which I am warranted in drawing from these observations is, that a mere demarkation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments, is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.
Guess who runs the electricity grid? Bureaucrats. Government.
Why are American bureaucrats smarter than Soviet or Chinese bureaucrats? They famously killed a lot of people in their ten or five or whatever year plans which were centrally planned. The answer is they aren’t. The free market is smarter than all of them, even if as Daniel Kahneman postulated people are irrational.
Today, the American bureaucracy is trying to force a green energy utopian future. They do not even begin to understand the opportunity costs of that future.
writes an excellent substack on energy. He talks a lot about “energy density”. Lithium is not energy-dense when compared to oil. Nuclear energy is the most energy dense we know of today.Oil’s tyranny of density can be demonstrated by looking at the aviation sector and by doing a tiny bit of math. To make the math easy, let’s use metric units. And let’s focus on weight, as that factor is critical in aerospace. The gravimetric energy density of jet fuel is high: about 43 megajoules (million joules) per kilogram. (Low-enriched uranium, by the way, is 3.9 terajoules — trillion joules — per kilogram.)
Keep those numbers in mind as we look at the best-selling jet airliner in aviation history: the Boeing 737. A fully fueled 737-700 holds about 26,000 liters of jet fuel, weighing about 20,500 kilograms. That amount of fuel contains about 880 gigajoules (billion joules) of energy. The maximum take-off weight for the 737-700 is about 78,000 kilograms, therefore jet fuel may account for as much as 26 percent of the plane’s weight as it leaves the runway.
Bureaucrats always come up with “one size fits all” solutions to problems. This is why they never work. We have spent trillions to fight the war on poverty since LBJ’s Great Society and we haven’t won yet. Instead, we have trashed the American family structure and made things a lot worse.
A classical (not Keynesian) economist can figure the energy problem out far better than any bureaucrat because they understand opportunity costs and constraints.
Societies do better when they have access to cheap and plentiful energy. Our society is now an on-demand information age society. That means, when you turn your computer on, you want it to work. When the battery runs down, you want to plug it in and use it while it recharges.
Natural gas is plentiful and it’s a clean energy power source. Why the bureaucrats are trying to kill it is beyond me. I am not going to wait for the wind to blow so I can turn on my stove.
With the advance of artificial intelligence, the demand for cheap energy has gone up exponentially. We need AI. It’s going to change our lives for the better and not in a small way. In the interest of national defense and being self-sufficient, America needs to have domestic chip production and not rely on vulnerable places like Taiwan. That takes boatloads of cheap energy.
Georgia Power recently increased 17-fold its winter power demand forecast by 2031, citing growth in new industries such as EV and battery factories. AEP Ohio says new data centers and Intel’s $20 billion planned chip plant will increase strain on the grid. Chip factories and data centers can consume 100 times more power than a typical industrial business.
I am an investor in a data center and it is looking more and more like it is going to be a good investment.
There is only one answer to our energy problem. It’s nuclear. All the greenies can wax on about their nuclear fusion ideas. It’s nowhere near ready for prime-time and cannot scale at all. That’s for a few generations from now. Nuclear is the only way forward.
Trump ought to have in place a way to build nuclear power plants across the country if he gets elected and it is increasingly likely that will be the case.
At the same time, the Biden Administration’s push for electronic vehicles is dumb too. EVs are great for some things. For example, an around-town car that I can plug in when I go to sleep. That’s a perfect use for an EV.
There are tradeoffs. EVs aren’t exactly green in sum. Mining the stuff and getting rid of the battery is nasty to the environment. But, the air is cleaner and the noise pollution is less when EVs are used as around-town cars in cities/suburbs. If you live in a rural area, forget about an EV. Forget about them hauling stuff around the country too. Diesel engines are great at that.
When it comes to solar power there is a role. I think it works in decentralized ways. In sunny climates, it can be installed on homes and buildings and power things inside that structure. However, the cost per kilowatt is very very expensive. I installed solar on my house in sunny Nevada and the only way it works economically is via federal government subsidies. The numbers are too steep otherwise. Solar also isn’t “green” when you think about the steps to get elements out of the ground and manufactured into panels, and then disposed of after they reach their limit of useful life.
However, because the government is heavily involved and spends a lot of money in the green energy space it was easy for a Green Energy Industrial Complex to be built. Combine that with the scientists who manipulated statistics to give rise to the fear of global warming and you have yourselves a thing that won’t go away.
The free market would have done this far differently and more efficiently. The problem is the bureaucrats wouldn’t have power, the government politicians would have less power, and the grifters wouldn’t be able to make money doing nothing.
The climate change agenda is really just cover for the de-growthing, de-populating, and de-civilizing of the planet. The Green religion believes in a romantic pastoral utopia, and as is true of all leftist movements, believes that the ends justify the means. Increase poverty and suffering by withholding life-enhancing base-load energy? No problem, so long as it advances the long march to utopia. The climate agenda is a back-door opening to the totalitarian evil we thought collapsed with Socialism/Communism in the early 1990s. That door needs to be slammed shut, and nuclear energy (fission) is one of the most important ways to do that.
From the excellent book Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall, which explains our lack of technological progress in the last 50 years:
Fusion was always going to be the new, clean energy source of the future. As long as it was always 20 years away, nobody minded. But in the early days of the cold fusion phenomenon, it suddenly looked as if the millennium might be at hand, and many of the activists let the mask drop. Their objections really have nothing to do with pollution, or radiation, or risk, or global warming. They are about keeping abundant, cheap energy out of the hands of ordinary people. To a Green, cheap, clean, abundant energy really would have been a disaster, because people would gain the ability to change the Earth, and that is, for Green Agonistes, evil.
The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet. - Jeremy Rifkin.
Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. - Paul Ehrlich
It would be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it. - Amory Lovins