David Strom:
We would all love to live in a world with plentiful, reliable, and inexpensive energy produced by the sun, charging our nearly silent and comfortable electric vehicles that go 600 miles per charge and recharge in 7 minutes, but the fact is that we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where we have to make difficult choices between suboptimal choices. We try to maximize benefits, minimize costs, and ensure that we don’t sacrifice morality and ethics while doing so.
The only way to make these choices rationally is through an honest evaluation of all the variables, not overhyped rhetoric that exaggerates and diminishes facts in order to create a false narrative.
That is the MO of the carbon-free fanatics.
The push for maximizing solar and wind power is being pushed by fanatics who, often, benefit from producing solar and wind power infrastructure. More nuclear and hydropower, backed up by natural gas peaking power plants is the most rational generating system we can build right now. Keeping coal plants open while we get there and in the places where it makes the most sense is also rational, although I am less enthusiastic about the long-term future of coal than many of my friends.
We need to stop the hype and focus on practicalities. Unfortunately, the Left and the rest of us have competing and incompatible goals. The Left is pushing “degrowth,” and less power production is actually a goal of theirs. Fewer people, less consumption. Most of us want an expanding economy and technological progress.
Closing reliable power plants makes sense if you want degrowth, and “renewable” energy is a good way to convince people you are replacing that power-generating capacity without really doing so. It creates an incremental but inevitable reduction in total production.
In the meantime, though, the Uighurs are paying a high price for the “moral” principles of the envirocommunists.
# posted by Ranger @ 7:52 PM
