Green Zombie
“Zombie industry” is the amusing coinage for industry that is walking around the landscape putrid and foul, kept moving by heavy government subsidy and regulatory intervention. Much of what passes for “green” energy production looks an awful lot like zombie industry. If it weren’t for government mandates, regulations, and forced consumption, the environmentally destructive technologies of wind farms, solar panels, and plug-in battery vehicles would likely only exist on the margins of the economy. In the case of plug-in battery vehicles, it is probably just as accurate to say the products would likely be more marginal than they are with huge government tax incentives.
Arnold Kling offers four possible scenarios resulting from this massive industrial policy enacted in the name of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, by pouring lots of money borrowed from future taxpayers in order to furnish advantages to American domestic industrial interests today. Years from now, says Kling, the possible outcomes include:
Total Success: The subsidies are being phased out, and the new facilities mostly stand on their own.
Cut Our Losses: The subsidies are being phased out, and the new facilities mostly go out of business.
Rent-Seeking Forever: The subsidies continue, even though the new facilities could mostly stand on their own.
Black Hole: The subsidies continue, supporting facilities that cannot stand on their own.
Kling thinks the most likely future policy developments are in the last two. Past experience suggests he is right. Subsidies and industrial protection for American sugar growers has been unstoppable thanks to concentrated interests in favor and diffuse interests opposed. Similarly, when the ethanol mandate for gasoline was implemented, American corn growers and processors found a new source of guaranteed income that no politician would deny them, lest it cost them a presidential primary deep in Iowa corn country.
If any of these industrial policies touted as necessary to fight “climate change” were under serious threat, we would be treated to a rash of emotional reports lamenting the loss of small farmers or windmill and solar farm installers. Nostalgia, after all, comes at a minor cost to each of us in the form of a few cents paid at the gas pump each visit. That’s usually sufficient to convince an ambitious politician that the easier course is to avoid looking heartless and keep the subsidies in place.
The most frustrating aspect of observing politics is witnessing bad ideas get cast into ill-advised but permanent policies that serve as a foundation for ever greater, more ambitious, and even less desirable policies to be built upon them. If there were one single shortcoming of liberal democratic constitutional systems of government, it is that they lack a method for reviewing and unwriting laws that are outdated and have become a hindrance to further innovation and development.
Long story short I own 4 pairs of eyeglasses (two are Bose headphone eyeglasses). The pair I wore last night, I couldn't find them this morning, causing me to wonder if I had had put them on autopilot last night. But I didn't autoeject them, so hmmmm. I keep thinking Bose ought to add a sound feature to them "Alexa, beep my glasses so I can find them".
I pulled on a different pair, and found the missing pair; they had gotten knocked off the night stand. Has anyone asked USAF if they've checked near the nightstand for that F-35?🙄
I was just looking in the forestry manual for the list of tree pests and diseases I need to teach next week, and, since last year, they've updated the manual to change "gypsy moth" to "spongy moth," because you're not allowed to say "gypsy" or People Will Die.