Low Energy

Monday, May 27, 2024

Low Energy

In civilizations, as in individual people, we can reach levels of neuroticism at which we adopt strange assumptions. Strange assumptions will cause us to take strange actions sooner or later.

A recent strange idea that has taken hold among us is that we can exist without using much energy. Our erstwhile Best and Brightest want to act on this idea by forcing us to eliminate energy generation for an imaginary greater good that haunts the parts of their minds where dreams reside.

Long-time West Virginia news and public affairs broadcaster Hoppy Kercheval writes an opinion column for West Virginia MetroNews, where he also hosts a daily call-in radio show. One of his recent columns drew attention to the neurotic self-sabotaging policies our leaders are foisting on the nation, as if banishing and restricting energy generation could only produce positive outcomes:

The Biden administration’s EPA has released new carbon emission rules that will force the country’s remaining coal-fired power plants to close, make it more difficult for future natural gas power plants to operate and put even more of a strain on the nation’s energy grid.

The new regulation requires coal plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent by 2039. The only way that can be achieved is by installing carbon sequestration equipment. That remains commercially unviable and a regulatory nightmare. (Read here how West Virginia officials have responded.)

The EPA knows this, of course, but it allows the agency to say it is willing to allow a way forward for the coal plants, while the real goal is to rapidly finish off the domestic coal industry, even as China continues to build out its coal-fired power plants.

This puts the United States on the same course as a few other modern developed countries that have tried to regulate effective energy production out of existence—because the political leaders find it aesthetically displeasing to produce energy by traditional means. It all looks so very dirty in comparison to windmills, solar panels drum circles, and graduate seminars. Coal mines, oil wells, and natural gas pipelines are eyesores for the leadership class.

Anyone who looks at how dirty the processes are to manufacture industrial solar panels and wind turbines would have to conclude that coal, petroleum, natural gas, and nuclear energy are comparatively clean. But these details go unreported, for the most part, since the class from which we draw our news reporters and leaders have decided industry and dirt can only come from traditional sources. They have effectively propagandized much of the public—and themselves.

The dirt resulting from traditional technologies is at least geographically contained. The unreliable energy sources require industrial sprawl without limits. They have massive footprints that consume lots of arable land, turning boundless acreage into industrial sites to harvest the diffuse energy from wind and sun. Harvesting wind and sun requires industrial equipment installations that cover multiple more acres of land than fossil fuels, much less nuclear energy. The landscape has to be covered in concrete pads serving as foundations for each of the individual windmills and solar panels; those pads will stay put for centuries to come, if they aren’t jackhammered apart for disposal when the 30-year lifespan of the average solar panel or wind turbine ends. Usually they just remain as hulking industrial ruins marring the landscape for future generations to behold.

As Kercheval says, the authoritarians running mainland China—the Chinese Communist Party—are expanding rather than restricting their own energy production, and they are positioning themselves to take over industrial manufacturing for the entire world. Our leaders are hard at work banishing heavy industry based on fears that it is irredeemably dirty; Chinese leadership are expanding the same to make themselves into global monopolists, providing products at prices that drive global competitors out of business. It is a simple and obvious medium-term strategy, and our leaders act as if it were unimportant.

The CCP is exploiting an obvious weakness of our wealthy society. We love the comforts of modern life, but abhor what we think of as its filthy production. They understand that they can subsidize production of the goods we want, acquiring the skills to do so throughout entire supply chains. They satisfy the delusion among our leaders that deindustrialization is not only possible, but that it is also viable and cheap. Meanwhile, the skills they acquire through practice languish and disappear here—even for manufacturing basic material inputs for our electric system, our pharmaceuticals, even our defense industry.

As the United States has become a leading world supplier of natural gas and petroleum resources—much as we already were with coal—our political leaders have redoubled their efforts to banish energy production by making it prohibitively costly. The Chinese, along with other hostile countries, are refining those resources and keeping them cheap in order to make their manufacturing industries the exclusive global sources. If it comes to war, we won’t have the ability to produce our own gear to defend ourselves. We won’t even have access to the energy required to power the manufacturing plants. This will make us look all the more inviting to attack: looking like we are comparatively weak.

Worst of all, the people willfully maneuvering us into such a weak position appear unconcerned with explaining how any of this is supposed to work to our benefit: strengthening our foreign adversaries while making ourselves dependent on them. Instead, they continue to pursue policies here that overwhelmingly favor our adversaries. Our leaders are failing us at every turn.