Clicking the Emerald Slippers, Stealing Your Money

National Journal ran a piece yesterday (behind a paywall) by the German Marshall Fund’s Bruce Stokes, making the arguments that will be ratcheted up in the Senate beginning on Monday in favor of mandating windmills and solar panels: if we don’t mandate them, we not only won’t be using them but we won’t be making them either! This dire situation will leave the Chinese only themselves to sell the things to. Carry the one and you see how that harms our competitiveness.

Where to begin? At the root of this ritual case is a strange notion that being a leader in something – here, it’s windmills or solar panels – is intrinsically a desirable end. As I discuss in “Power Grab”: if we’re not the world’s windmill king…so what? It’s a windmill. It is not, as President Obama said, a new technology”, one of his rhetorical repetitions the curiosity of which should require no elaboration. Windmills are not a strategic industry. We have centuries of fossil fuels.

And after all this time windmills have come about as far as they can and will come with the possible exceptions of improvements in efficiency at the margins(solar is spectacularly worse). The laws of physics will not be repealed, the wind cannot be made to blow any more or regularly, and you will not decrease the host of very troubling NIMBY and other issues elaborated here by George Will.

Even rabid demander of such mandates, Obama’s Science Czar” (and population nut) John Holdren implicitly acknowledges the falsehood of the sales pitch that we can replace energy sources that work with windmills and solar panels. This leaves us with the principal argument in favor of these costly schemes, reported by E&E News last week as even acknowledged by Brookings Institute economist Adele Morris, as “the immediate need to reduce emissions”.

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