A SILLY GREENIE TRACT

I never "fisk" anything on any of my sites but sometimes I am tempted. I reproduce below two of the opening paragraphs of a piece of Green/Left propaganda written by Andrew Simms as an article in the June 28th issue of New Statesman. The full article is no longer free online but I have saved a copy to disk and it is still at the moment available via the Google cache here. I will reproduce below it a comment from the Australian Libertarian site and then add a couple of comments of my own.

Simms writes:

"In the energy-supply industry, the inferior technology is a global economy increasingly addicted to fossil fuels. The result? We are hooked up to devastating climate change, and, because of the imminent divergence between peak oil production and rising energy demand, we face a lasting economic shock. Waiting in the wings, too, is a resurgent nuclear industry still grappling with unsolved problems of immortal waste, pollution, high costs and security demands that are both oppressive and vulnerable.

Energy economists are fond of saying that, with energy, there is no such thing as a free lunch. True, there are costs involved in tapping clean, renewable energy sources such as the sun, the tides and wind. But they are, in important senses, free. They are free of greenhouse-gas emissions, free from the threat of depletion, and free of the risks and authoritarianism associated with nuclear power. While there is no getting round the fact that it takes energy to make energy, the energy gain from renewables is much greater than other sources of power. The energy gain from coal, for example, can be as little as five times the energy expended, whereas a windfarm can generate 80 times the energy input."

Comment on the above from the Australian Libertarian site follows:

In a recent edition of New Statesman I read an article by Andrew Simms on the need for the government to force people to switch to renewable power. Apparently there are two problems with using fossil fuels which mean that we all need to hurry up and switch to renewable energy now - or else!

The first problem is that we're going to run out of fossil fuels soon. The second problem is that we're going to keep using the fossil fuels well into the future.

Huh? It may have occured to you, dear reader, that these concerns appear to contradict each other. But that is only because you're thinking like a rational person and not a green ideologue. Shame on you. You probably kill babies too.

The basic argument, as put forward by Mr Simms, was that energy requirements would continue to grow, and that this would be met largely through fossil fuels. However, the "dwindling supplies of oil" is going to cause a problem, with "energy prices on a sky-high trip that most developing countries may never recover from". But because people will continue to use fossil fuels, we are going to run head first into global warming. Or cooling. Or something.

Somebody with less faith in government and more faith in reality may quibble over the exact dangers of global warming and the liklihood of running out of oil any time soon. But there is a more fundamental error in the above logic that shows a scary inability to think these issues through. This error is that Simms has ignored behavioural change.

Elsewhere in his article Simms notes that the cost of renewable power has come down significantly and is now only a bit more expensive than fossil fuels. Renewable energy sources are expected to get even more competitive in the near future. So if we accept the argument that we'll run out of oil soon, then oil prices will increase and renewable energy will be relatively cheaper. People will naturally switch to renewable energy and the consumption of fossil fuels will decrease. No "sky-high" energy prices. No global melt-down. Simple economics.

If, however, people are going to continue to use fossil fuels into the future - resulting in the flooding of California (is this a benefit or cost?) - then this implies that oil prices will remain below the cost of renewable energy, which means we wouldn't be running out of oil.

Simms can't have it both ways. Either oil prices are going up (so we switch to renewables naturally under the free market) or they're not. It's not possible for us to suffer the costs associated both with high oil prices and low oil prices at the same time. Unfortunately for the green movement - the world isn't in as much trouble as they think.

Some further comments:

Simms plugs wind power but fails to mention that most Greens now oppose it because the windmills spoil the scenery and kill birds. And windmills need coal-fired backup anyway for when the wind is not blowing. So you have the huge cost of doubling all your generating capacity if you use wind. Thank goodness the Greenies have gone off the idea.

"Authoritarianism" as a danger from nuclear power is a new one on me but my first response is that using nuclear power is nowhere nearly as authoritarian as the Greenies trying to dictate to us how to live every detail of our lives.

Counter-intuitive though it at first seems, oil reserves are increasing, not decreasing. But even if we do run out of oil, industrial alcohol brewed from sugar costs at the moment only about double what gasoline costs. And most of the world already pays many times more than double what gasoline costs because of taxes on it. So a switch to alcohol as a motor fuel need only involve a slight cut in the overall government tax take for the motorist to notice no difference. And the motor fuel sold in many countries is already part-alcohol. See my post of May 20th.

And the only barriers to safe disposal of nuclear waste are legal ones thrown up by Greenies. And one of the last of those barriers has just been removed.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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