How Politics and Fanatacism Ruin Research
Look At Energy
When things get hyper-political and a federal bureaucracy and federal dollars are added to the cause, everything gets screwed up.
I remember being in 2nd Grade and reading in my “Weekly Reader” some story about how we were going to have electric cars. That would be a publication made for public school kids in 1969. I was 7.
It really wasn’t until my 50s that electric cars became somewhat of a reality. Even today, lots of limitations but they are cool.
My point is somewhere along the way there was lobbying from private industry and politicians realized that they could create a way for themselves to get more power by giving a honeypot of government money to the right universities and NGOs for government research into electric cars.
It didn’t matter if they were useful or not.
The same can be said for a lot of things government spends its money on. Back in the late 1970s Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire created the “Golden Fleece Award”. Today, Senator Rand Paul echoes that with a Twitter stream at the end of the year highlighting all the wasteful shit government spends money on. If you are counting, it’s 50 years later and the government is still wasting money on stupid stuff. These things are funny but that’s about it.
However, that waste is a diversion. 70% of the federal budget is mandated spending on all kinds of social programs. There is no negotiation about it. Think about that the next time you pay taxes to fund our ever-ballooning federal deficit.
I think the biggest waste of federal money has been in energy. President Carter created the Department of Energy back in the 1970s as a response to the “energy crisis” which was really just due to the fact demand outstripped supply and we didn’t have enough refining capacity or storage capacity in the United States. We still don’t.
Back in the 1970s, you’d read about things like solar power heating our homes and powering the electric grid. Today, you can still read about that, and maybe someday three centuries and trillions of dollars from now they will figure it out.
There is an entire industry that has been propped up by lobbying, government dollars, and the pursuit of political power through the boondoggle of solar power. I have never seen a cash-flow-positive green energy company or project that can stand on its own without government subsidies.
What we have learned is solar can be used in isolated, controlled instances for small isolated projects. But, as a scalable power source for an on-demand energy economy, it sucks. So does wind. Breaking wind might provide more energy as people move quickly to another room to avoid the stench.
If we had spent all the money we wasted on solar and wind energy on nuclear energy we would have had a lot of problems solved.
But, bureaucracies don’t work that way. It is kneeling at the altar of global warming with all of its fanaticism. Not only that, the fanatics have changed the rules to make ESG investing legal so the honey pot of private money can be diverted into the pool without repercussions to managers who avoid their actual fiduciary responsibility. Their actual responsibility is to use money to make more money for customers. ESG doesn’t do that.
That’s why this might be big news. Nuclear fusion, not fission, has supposedly been performed at the Livermore Laboratory in California. But, it is still decades away.
If we want it to actually come to fruition faster I have some suggestions.
Do away with the Department of Energy bureaucracy. It’s a useless paper-pushing organization rife with politics. What problem has it ever solved since its inception other than to give jobs to government drones and issue official-sounding memos?
End spending on solar and wind projects, diverting all that money into building nuclear fission plants, along with spending money on nuclear fusion research.
Let private industry lead the way. Capitalism is far more innovative than the government.
Maybe Artificial Intelligence can figure it out before scientists do.
Dear Jeffrey - How can an affect morph into an effect in the same sentence?
"do to the fact demand outstripped supply and we didn’t have enough refining capacity or storage ..." I don't mean to sound pedantic, but "due to" would have been correct here. And I seem to remember that the "energy crisis" in the 1970s was because of the formation of OPEC, which limited oil shipments, and which in turn had something to do with Israel.