As you frequent readers know, my favorite law is the law of unintended consequences. Virtually anything our politicians put their minds to have consequences they didn’t plan on. They seem to have a religious fervor about a topic, and don’t consider just what might happen if they plowed ahead.
The headlines today, after you get past the winners and losers in the election, and the bombing in Poland, seem to be surrounding the ‘green’ movement and what is happening world wide.
Germany: The Germans have discovered that closing their nuclear power plants and shuttering their coal powered electric generators was not a good move. They are now scrambling to reopen these vilified power sources to keep their citizens warm this winter.
Africa: The head of the African union is telling the COP conference in Egypt that they want to use their extremely abundant natural resources (read that natural gas) to power their emerging economies. For them, renewable energy is simply not reliable enough and too expensive.
Worldwide: Automakers are deciding to use a different kind of battery on their electric vehicles to lower the cost – the kind of battery used on most cars in China. However, the new battery will lower the range of the EV. Not a good selling point.
Finance: Since it has been determined that wind farms are not truly financially viable, (expensive to build, expensive to maintain) and not really profitable, the private funding that was flowing into the wind side of the ‘green economy’ is drying up. I think this is the most telling. Let’s face it. Wall Street doesn’t put money where it won’t grow.
Government support: The green economy has grown based on government largess plus laws, like California, soon to require only EV sales in the state. If it was truly popular with the marketplace, none of this should be necessary.
The latest survey shows that about a third of the population in the US are likely to install a solar panel, buy and EV, install an EV charger at home, or even work in a ‘green’ industry. The rest are either negative or ambivalent. The market is not jumping on board.
So, in spite of trillions in government money invested, laws requiring green activity everywhere, entire countries moving their power sources to renewable energy, the law of unintended consequences is proving itself valid.
So, we are becoming mired in a so called ‘green economy’ the consequence of which is seemingly endless funding and legal requirements by all levels of government, and after decades of trying, only about a third of the populace is falling in line. AND we are finding that much of the renewable power supply and the like simply isn’t up to the requirements of modern power needs either in developed countries, or in developing countries.
We just can’t seem to get around my favorite law, whether we want to or not.
JVH
