Renewable Energy? At Any Price? Any? ....

SEE HERE I personally think that most of the renewable energy folks are using that same kool-ade that the rest of the global warming nut jobs are using. The idea appears to be that some forms of energy are better than others based on ideology and not common sense or any other kind of cents.

Here's the deal. Mother Nature gifted us with a whole lot of coal, natural gas, crude oil, shale oil, and other stuff. If you burn any of it you get what you always get when you burn hydrocarbons and that's water and CO2. In the case of some materials you also get some impurities like sulfur which may have some slightly deleterious effects since it combine with water to become sulfuric acid which is environmentally a slight problem if it gets concentrated causes acid rain or attacking and causing damage long term to thing that don't care for sulfuric acid. So you do have to be careful and sensitive to the environment and what you are doing. That being said, CO2 is not a pollutant even in very large quantities.

Now the myth goes that you can replace all of the energy used with such exciting things as wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, and any other thing that will turn a generator. And it's true, more or less. The problem is that you can't afford those alternatives because they are very very costly and generally can't scale all that well to do what everyone wants, which is live pretty much the way they want to. Now why should we use more expensive technology in deference to less expensive technology? Why? ... the answer isn't very convincing frankly. The answer is because a bunch of ideologues think it's a better idea. Okay, there are always differences of opinion. Why is it a better idea? They say that it's renewable. That's a bit of a buzz word. They ought to also ask if it is scalable? A lot of the renewable energy doesn't scale very well.

Now that is a problem because it means that no matter how much money you spend you can't necessarily get there from here. The only long term solution is energy that is truly abundant. Solar energy would have that characteristic if it were easy to convert to the kind of energy we routinely use like electricity, but it isn't, at least not very efficiently.

Conservation is another strategy which really boils down to use less energy and what we have will last longer. I think that's a good idea. You first! As long as you can afford to use the energy what business do other people have telling you that you can or can't. I don't buy expensive clothes for example. Is it OK if I use the money I didn't spend on expensive clothes to buy energy and use it any way I wish?

What all these totalitarians want to do is tell other people how to live their lives. I think we'd be much better off with a free market in energy as in everything else. Then if we start running out of some particular form of energy the pricing mechanism of the free market will get people going to find alternatives that are cheaper to replace the resource that is declining. That's a system that actually works. What these other things do is give disproportionate power to people who want to run your life and who, by the way, don't really have solutions, just ideologies.