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Four Dirty Secrets
about Clean Energy
By Alex Epstein
Published June 03, 2011
For years, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has
demanded that the U.S. and other industrialized countries cut carbon
emissions to 20% of 1990 levels by 2050.
While most countries claim to support huge carbon caps, in practice
they have resisted implementing them. The reason is simple: fossil
fuels provide nearly 90% of the energy we use--the cheap, abundant fuel
that powers modern farming, manufacturing, construction,
transportation, and hospitals. The use of fossil fuels is directly
correlated to quality and quantity of life, particularly through the
generation of electricity ; in the past two decades, hundreds of
millions of people have risen out of poverty because energy production
has tripled in India and quadrupled in China, almost exclusively from
carbon-based fuels. To drastically restrict carbon-based fuels,
countries have conceded in practice, would be an economic disaster.
Now, the IPCC claims that the economics are on the side of drastic CO2
reductions. It recently announced that “Close to 80 percent of the
world’s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if
backed by the right enabling public policies…”
This announcement is the latest claim by a growing coalition of
environmentalists, businessmen, politicians, journalists, and academics
that we can ban our fossil fuels and have cheap energy, too--through
the panacea of “clean energy”--energy with minimal carbon emissions or
other impacts. Clean energy advocates claim that a “clean energy
economy” will be far more prosperous than our current “dirty energy”
economy. Coal, oil, and natural gas supplies are finite and therefore
bound to get more and more expensive as they run out, they argue. By
contrast, we have an essentially unlimited, free, never-ending supply
of sun and wind available to use--“free forever,” as Al Gore puts it.
What if we could use fuels that are not expensive, don’t cause
pollution and are abundantly available right here at home? We have such
fuels. Scientists have confirmed that enough solar energy falls on the
surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire
world’s energy needs for a full year. Tapping just a small portion of
this solar energy could provide all of the electricity America uses.
And enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to
also meet 100 percent of U.S. electricity demand.
To those who say the costs are still too high: I ask them to consider
whether the costs of oil and coal will ever stop increasing if we keep
relying on quickly depleting energy sources to feed a rapidly growing
demand all around the world.
By contrast, Gore says, there are “renewable sources that can give us
the equivalent of $1 per- gallon gasoline.”
To severely cap carbon emissions, then, won’t be an economic disaster
but an economic boon. And it’s not just Al Gore saying this: myriad
investors (such as venture capitalist Vinod Khosla), businessmen (such
as oil-turned-wind magnate T. Boone Pickens), journalists (such as New
York Times superstar Thomas L. Friedman), and politicians (including
President Barack Obama), are on board.
The president of the Environmentalist Defense Fund sums up the
sentiment: “The winners of the race to reinvent energy will not only
save the planet, but will also make megafortunes… fixing global warming
won’t be a drain on the economy. On the contrary, it will unleash one
of the greatest floods of new wealth in history.”
All that is required, he and others say, is for the government to enact
the right “clean energy policy.” These policy proposals vary, but all
agree on two things: the government must drastically cap carbon
emissions (Al Gore wants a ban on carbon-generated electricity by 2018
) and the government must extensively fund clean energy research and
projects to “unleash one of the greatest floods of new wealth in
history.”
But before you pull any levers at the voting booth, you should know
that there are some dirty secrets about the campaign for “clean energy.”
Dirty Secret #1: If “clean energy” were actually cheaper than fossil
fuels, it wouldn’t need a policy.
Al Gore claims that he knows of “renewable sources that can give us the
equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline.” Then why doesn’t he go make a
fortune on it by outcompeting gasoline-powered cars?
More broadly, if other sources of energy are so good, why must the
government have a policy to support them and cripple their competitors?
Wouldn’t the self-interest of utilities, of automakers, of factories
make them more than eager to buy such fuels--and wouldn’t the
self-interest of investors make them eager to put billions upon
billions of dollars into these game-changing technologies? Energy is,
after all, a multi-trillion dollar market in America alone. And if
carbon-based fuels are as rapidly-depleting as we’re told, wouldn’t
participants in the energy futures market be trying to make a killing
by buying coal, oil, and gas contracts? And wouldn’t the rising prices
of these fuels make it even easier for “clean energy” to compete?
Energy history is replete with examples of genuinely superior
technologies outcompeting the status quo. Petroleum surpassed whale oil
and several other now-forgotten products once it could provide the best
light at the best price. Natural gas surpassed oil as a source of
electricity generation for similar reasons. Can’t new sources of energy
do the same?
“Clean energy” advocates often intimate that private investors and
existing energy companies are too short-sighted to see the wondrous
potential of their products. But this is far-fetched. Oil companies
invest billions of dollars in research and development that will only
pay off decades into the future. Can anyone doubt that with increasing
worldwide demand for energy, they wouldn’t jump at the chance to add
new sources of profitable energy to their portfolios? Or even if they
are myopic, what about the enormous capital-allocating machine that is
U.S. financial markets? Is Wall Street going to pass up on “one of the
greatest new floods of wealth in history” by failing to make profitable
investments?
But aren’t subsidies needed to correct some unfair advantage possessed
by coal, oil, and natural gas? No. Solar and wind are the ones given an
unfair advantage; per unit of energy produced, they already receive 90X
more subsidies than oil and gas. And they have been subsidized for
decades.
The one legitimate argument that energy investment in new technologies,
including carbon-free ones, is too low is that heavy government
taxation and environmental regulations drive many investors out of the
energy sector. But “clean energy policies” such as cap-and-trade bills
call for more taxes and regulations, not fewer.
The real reason why activists demand “clean energy policy” is simple:
the “clean energy” sources they favor--especially solar and wind--are
at present too expensive and unreliable to replace carbon-based fuels
on a large scale. The only way activists can hope to have them adopted
is to shove them down our throats.
Dirty Secret #2: Clean energy advocates want to force us to use solar,
wind, and biofuels, even though there is no evidence these can power
modern civilization.
For more than three decades, environmentalists have overwhelmingly
favored replacing carbon-based fuels with “natural,” “renewable” energy
coming directly from the sun--whether through direct sunlight (solar
panels or solar thermal), wind (a product of currents created by the
sun’s heat) or biofuels (plants nourished by the sun through
photosynthesis.) They have generally opposed carbon-free nuclear energy
and hydroelectric energy as unnecessary and insufficiently “green.”
They have acquired billions in taxpayer subsidies for solar, wind, and
biofuels, in America and in “progressive” European countries. After
three decades, the score is in. 86% of the world’s energy--the energy
we use to make food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and everything
else our livelihoods depend on--is produced by carbon-based fuels
(coal, oil, natural gas). 6% is produced by hydroelectric power. 6% is
produced by nuclear power. Thus, 98% of the world’s power generation is
regarded as unacceptable by environmentalists. All of 2%--an expensive
2%--is produced by solar, wind, and biofuels. And despite incessant
claims that carbon-based fuels will run out, the amount of fossil fuel
practically accessible to us has increased greatly as we have
discovered new sources for fossil fuels (as well as non-fossil sources
such as uranium and thorium)--and if businesses are free to keep
exploring, there is no evidence this will stop anytime soon.
So why haven’t solar and wind triumphed? After all, isn’t Al Gore right
that the sun gives us more energy than we could ever need, “free
forever”?
No. The sun certainly gives off a lot of energy--but harnessing it is
anything but free. To harness any form of energy requires land, labor,
and equipment. And solar, wind, and biofuels require far, far more
resources to harness than other methods of power generation.
One reason is energy density. Most practical energy sources pack a high
concentration of energy into a small amount of space, meaning a smaller
swath of resources is needed to harness it. Oil, for example, is so
energy dense that a gallon of it can move a Hummer and a load of
passengers over 10 miles. Uranium has one million times the energy
density of oil (though it takes far more complex equipment to extract
the energy).
By contrast, the sun’s energy is highly diluted by the time it reaches
earth, and therefore it requires massive quantities of land, equipment,
materials, manpower, and energy (provided by fossil fuels,
incidentally) to concentrate into electric power. A solar or wind farm
takes on the order of 100 times the land, materials, and assembly
energy to produce the same amount of kilowatt-hours as an equivalent
nuclear or coal or natural gas plant --while a cornfield for ethanol
requires 1,000 times the land to generate the same amount of energy,
with so much energy required that the whole process loses energy by
some estimates. The cost of such resources is why solar and wind have
been expensive, marginal energy sources for so long.
Another major problem with solar and wind is that they produce energy
only intermittently--wind is extremely variable, disappearing
throughout the day; solar varies with the weather and disappears
altogether at night. Our whole modern power system requires reliable
energy, energy that can be counted on.
Consequently, any solar or wind installation attempting to generate
reliable energy needs a backup source of energy. One hypothetical way
to do this is to build additional solar/wind capacity and try to store
it. But since this just adds much more cost, and since no compact,
cost-effective storage option exists (large, water-pumping
hydroelectric facilities are an option in some locations), the default
option is to build additional fossil fuel plants to back up solar and
wind power.
A typical case is Texas, where Governor Rick Perry has heralded his
state as an archetype of renewable wind-power. But according to those
managing the power grids, only “8.7% of the installed wind capability
can be counted on as dependable capacity during the peak demand period
for the next year.” This means that the wind turbines are hardly doing
anything constructive; the natural gas “backup” is doing all the work.
Some studies say that the wind turbines only add to CO2 emissions,
since natural gas plants are far less efficient and use more fuel when
they must cycle to compensate for erratic wind power.
But, you might ask, aren’t there other types of carbon-free energy that
are more practical? The answer is yes and no--there are promising types
of carbon-free energy, but “clean energy policy” and its
environmentalist leaders will always stop or slow them for being
insufficiently “green.”
Dirty Secret #3: There are promising carbon-free energy
sources--hydroelectric and nuclear--but “clean energy” policies oppose
them as not “green” enough.
In 1975, a fledgling energy industry reported that its members were
producing electricity at a total cost of less than half of what coal
plants could. Better yet, this industry’s technology generated
virtually no pollution and no CO2. Better yet still, this industry was
in its relative infancy; thousands of scientists and engineers were
brimming with ideas about how to make power-generation better, cheaper,
more efficient.
If the environmentalist movement--the movement leading today’s “clean
energy” campaign--was truly interested in maximum human progress,
including making our surroundings maximally conducive to human life, it
would have celebrated this industry: nuclear power. Instead,
environmentalists effectively destroyed it with lies and propaganda--a
tactic they are repeating with the earthquake-and-tsunami-stricken
nuclear reactors in Japan.
Environmentalists have always claimed that their concern is safety. But
the most reliable indication of a technology’s safety is how many
deaths it has caused per unit of energy produced. In the capitalist
world, nuclear power in its entire history has not led to a single
death from meltdowns, radiation, or any of the allegedly intolerable
dangers cited by nuclear critics. This does not mean that deaths are
impossible, but as scientists have repeatedly shown, the worst-case
scenario for a nuclear reactor is far better than, say, the ravages of
a dam breaking or of a natural gas explosion.
In reality, all the “safety” objections come down to the Green premise
that nuclear power is “unnatural” and therefore must be bad. Nuclear
power is radioactive, they say--not mentioning that so is the sun, and
that taking a walk, let alone an airplane ride, exposes you to far more
radioactivity than does living next to a nuclear power plant. A nuclear
plant could be bombed by terrorists, and bring about some sort of
Hiroshima 2, they say--not mentioning that the type of uranium used in
a nuclear plant and a nuclear bomb are completely different, and that
the uranium in a plant can’t explode.
Nuclear power generates waste, they say--not mentioning that the amount
of waste is thousands of times smaller than for any other practical
source of energy, that it can be safely stored, and that there are many
technologies for utilizing the waste to generate even more energy.
Still, Greenpeace proclaims: “Greenpeace has always fought -- and will
continue to fight - vigorously against nuclear power because it is an
unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution
is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, and for the shutdown of
existing plants.”
The practical result of all this hysteria was to make permission to
build nuclear power plants nearly impossible to get, to impose an
astronomical number of unnecessary “safety” requirements that served
only to drive up price, and to make the whole process of building a
plant a multi-decade affair.
Today, environmentalists say, with relish, that nuclear power can’t
compete on the market--“Nuclear is dying of an incurable attack of
market forces,” says solar-peddler Amory Lovins--even though before
their intervention, it did compete, and was winning. Who knows how
spectacularly it could produce cheap, abundant, carbon-free energy
today--were it not for the opposition of those who claim to be
concerned about carbon emissions?
Nuclear power is not an isolated target. Environmentalists have spent
the last three decades shutting down as many hydroelectric dams as
possible, despite hydro’s proven track record as a cheap, reliable
source of carbon-free power (albeit one more limited than nuclear since
there are only so many suitable river sites for hydropower).
The reason is this: environmentalism isn’t just about minimizing our
carbon “footprint”--it’s about reducing any footprint on nature: on
land, rivers, swamps, animals, bugs. Hydroelectric power, while it
doesn’t emit CO2, dramatically changes the natural flow of the rivers
where it is used. Nuclear power, in addition to requiring large
industrial structures, deals in “unnatural” high-energy, radioactive
materials and processes. Therefore, it is not, says Al Gore, “truly
clean energy.”
Dirty Secret #4: The environmentalists behind clean energy policy are
anti-energy.
If you think that there might be some form of practical “clean energy”
that could appease the environmentalists--say, geothermal--you’re
missing the point. The whole environmentalist idea of a minimal
“footprint” is fundamentally anti-energy. Mass-energy production
requires making a substantial impact on nature--in diverted land, in
power lines, in any byproducts or waste--and therefore
environmentalists can always find something to object to. And this
includes solar and wind.
For all the talk of “being green,” solar and wind require far greater
amounts of land and materials-use than practical energy--their land
“footprint” and resource usage is far larger. Huge, 400-foot tall
wind-turbines with 150-foot blades and noise known to cause unbearable
headaches a mile away do not exactly embody the environmentalist ideal
of “living in harmony with nature.” Nor are tens or hundreds or
thousands of square miles of solar panels. Nor are the enormous
transmission lines necessary to bring energy from, say, Nevada to
California. And so while environmentalists are happy to wax about solar
and wind in the abstract while opposing existing power sources, once
the shovels start hitting the ground, in practice they often oppose it.
Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the biggest opponent of Cape
Wind , a windmill project off the coast of Nantucket. Environmentalists
were the first to object to a giant solar project in the Middle of the
Mojave Desert in California.
But where are we supposed to get our energy? “Conservation,”
environmentalists answer, which is code for “deprivation.” When pushed,
the leaders of the movement admit that they think that humans need to
live far more modestly, with perhaps a few solar panels on top of our
homes (Amory Lovins attempts this, and has acknowledged agonizing over
whether he could accommodate a dog for his daughter), that we need to
do with a lot less, and that we need to reduce the world’s population.
As climate-change star Paul Ehrlich says: “Whatever problem you’re
interested in, you’re not going to solve it unless you also solve the
population problem. Whatever your cause, it’s a lost cause without
population control.”
The Sierra Club advocates “development of adequate national and global
policies to curb energy over-use and unnecessary economic growth.” This
was written in 1974, when the energy-hungry computer revolution was
brand-new. Had we listened to them, it wouldn’t have had the power to
get off the ground. And they are no exception to this anti-development
mentality: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point,” says
climate change star Paul Ehrlich, “would be the moral equivalent of
giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Or, Amory Lovins: “If you ask me,
it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of
clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We
ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs,
but that won’t give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which
we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.”
This is the mentality wielding influence over our energy future. Can
one imagine any sort of energy that it would find favorable? Consider
the prospect of geothermal energy, which would use heat from the inside
of the earth’s crust. Al Gore claims to support this. To be used en
masse, such energy (as yet unproven) would require drilling tens of
thousands of feet deep. Given environmentalists’ opposition to offshore
drilling, can anyone imagine they will actually support geothermal
energy in practice?
Anyone who genuinely desires even better energy in the future than we
enjoy today must cut all ties with the anti-development
environmentalist movement and embrace industrial development.
Instead, the entire “clean energy” movement embraces environmentalists
as allies. The Sierra Club, Ehrlich, and Lovins are all regular
advisors to government on energy policy. While President Obama isn’t as
extreme as they are, we can see their anti-nuclear agenda in his energy
plan--which is focused on solar and wind, and includes a couple billion
in loan guarantees to a single nuclear plant (this is notable only
because the 2008 Democratic platform contained zero references to
nuclear energy).
The same is true for “clean energy” advocates such as Thomas L.
Friedman and Bill Gates; they advocate nuclear, but only
half-heartedly, with infinite regulation. So, in practice “clean energy
policy” will mean preserving the draconian controls on nuclear power,
stunting its growth, while subsidizing the impractical fuels that
environmentalists least object to.
The end result of this is pure destruction. This includes destruction
of what “clean energy” is supposed to ensure: a livable climate. The
number one precondition of a livable climate is industrial-scale
energy. Loose talk of a “climate change catastrophe” evades the fact
that industrial energy makes catastrophes non-catastrophic. In Africa,
a drought can wipe out hundreds of thousands of lives thanks to that
continent’s lack of capitalism and resultant lack of industrial energy.
In America, we irrigate so well that deserts have become among the most
desirable places to live (Southern California, Las Vegas).
Left free to discover and harness energy, human beings can adapt to
changes in weather. Anyone who cares about the plight of the poor must
recognize that what they desperately need is not a stagnant average
global temperature but capitalism, including cheap, affordable fossil
fuels now, and the freedom to find even better fuels later, unhampered
by environmental hysteria.
If we want more, better, energy, we should be considering, not policies
to control the energy economy, but policies to allow free markets and
true competition (not government-rigged stuff). And let the best fuel
win.
Alex Epstein is a fellow at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights,
focusing on business issues. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the
Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of
“Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”
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