Guest Post by John Stossel
The Green New Deal’s goal is to move America to zero carbon emissions in 10 years.
“That’s a goal you could only imagine possible if you have no idea how energy is produced,” James Meigs, former editor of Popular Mechanics magazine, says in my latest video.
“Renewable is so inconsistent,” he adds. “You can’t just put in wind turbines and solar panels. You have to build all this infrastructure to connect them with energy consumers.”
Because wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, “renewable” energy requires many more transmission lines, and bigger batteries.
Unfortunately, says Meigs: “You have to mine materials for batteries. Those mines are environmentally hazardous. Disposing of batteries is hazardous.”
“Batteries are a lousy way to store energy,” adds physicist Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Also, the ingredients of green energy, like battery packs, are far from green.
“You have to consume 100 barrels of oil in China to make that battery pack,” he explains. “Dig up 1,000 pounds of stuff to process it. Digging is done with oil, by big machines, so we’re consuming energy to ‘save’ energy — not a good path to go.”
Still, wind turbines and solar batteries are 10 times more efficient than when they were first introduced! That’s not good enough, writes Mills, to make “the new energy economy” anything more than “magical thinking.”
“They hit physics limits. In comic books, Tony Stark has a magic power source, but physics makes it impossible to make solar 10 times better again.”
The dream of “green” causes us to misdirect resources. Even after billions in government subsidies, solar still makes up less than 1 percent of America’s energy — wind just 2 percent. And even that energy isn’t really “clean.”
“We use billions of tons of hydrocarbons to make the windmills that are already in the world, and we’ve only just begun to make them at the level people claim they would like them to be built,” says Mills. “Pursue a path of wind, solar and batteries, we increase how much we dig up and move by a thousand-fold.”
“You gotta clear-cut the forest. These machines kill a lot of birds,” says Meigs. “I agree that we should bring down our carbon emissions … but we should also make sure we’re spending money on stuff that really works.”
There is one energy source, though, that efficiently produces lots of power with no carbon emissions: nuclear.
But people fear it. They point to the Chernobyl plant accident in Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan.
“The Chernobyl plant design was idiotically bad,” says Meigs. They don’t make nuclear plants like that anymore.
What about Fukushima?
“Fukushima helps prove how safe nuclear power really is. No one was killed.”
I pointed out that people were killed during the evacuation.
“Fear of radiation killed people,” responded Meigs. They evacuated older people who didn’t need to go.
People fear what they don’t understand and what they can’t see.
“A dam breaks, and hundreds of thousands of people die. Nuclear plants, their safety, ironically, is actually evident in their accidents!” says Mills.
“More people have fallen off of roofs installing solar panels than have been killed in the entire history of nuclear power in the U.S.,” adds Meigs.
Yet after Fukushima, Germany shut down its nuclear plants. That led to higher electricity prices and increased carbon emissions because Germany burned coal to make up for the loss of nuclear power.
Likewise, “in Bernie Sanders’ home state of Vermont, they shut down their nuclear plant. Guess what happened? Carbon emissions went up,” recounts Meigs. “This supposedly green state, ultra-liberal Vermont, went backwards.”
If a Green New Deal is ever implemented, says Mills, it would rob the poor by raising energy costs, while “giving money to wealthy people in the form of subsidies to buy $100,000 cars, to put expensive solar arrays on their roofs or to be investors in wind farms.”
“It’s upside-down Robin Hood,” he adds. “That’s a bad deal.”
Yet a majority of Americans — including Republicans surveyed — say they support some version of it.
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To say people don’t die from nuclear plants is disingenuous because it does not account for long term cancer deaths. It also ignores the potentially cataclysmic effect of multiple melt downs due to solar flare or EMP attack.
What long-term cancer deaths?
You do know that, even for radiation workers who get occupational exposure to radiate, the vast majority of their exposure is from background radiation, cosmic rays from space and medical procedures such as X-rays. The general public gets effectively none of their exposure from nuke plants.
Show us the data.
Show us the solar flare= meltdown mechanism.
Stossel has a serious problem when it comes to anything that HE personally doesn’t agree with. He negates countless violations of property rights, etc. simply because he doesn’t want to have his argument “messed up” with these facts. Virtually every government on earth provides massive cover for the nuclear power industry. Unless we are being honest about the real impacts, nothing will ever improve, but honesty is seen as yet another “roadblock” to this industry. Government is not supposed to be in the business of PROMOTING one industry over another, but the US has been that way pretty much since the beginning.
“More people have fallen off of roofs installing solar panels than have been killed in the entire history of nuclear power in the U.S.”
NEWS FLASH: The U.S. Department of Energy’s “Hatful of Hammers”, Secretary Rick Perry (who introduces himself like a Grammy-winning rap), asked President Trump today to introduce legislation banning roofs as a threat to nuclear energy.
the article started well & i believe in the general concept of what he says except the nuke part–
isn’t fukushima still leaking radioactive water as we speak?
when it was built,was 3 mile island a top of the line design?
i don’t trust nukes–
since aoc is associated w/the green movement i’ll post this here–this is from snl in 2013 but you’ll swear it’s aoc today–4″ of humor–
The original green dream. https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSU1qcjcoaPnd-FcysQaF7uKbytYiOFJF7-2qXO6oVygvjdgz_Z
bill deblasio’s green dreams–people like him are not stupid the way many of his voters are–he is either such a lying,cynical sob that he shouldn’t be in office or he’s so delusional he shouldn’t be in office–
either way,he shouldn’t be in office–
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bill-de-blasio-says-green-new-deal-will-ban-inefficient-steel-and-glass-skyscrapers
Former editor of Popular Mechanics haha. That trash, clean fingernail, soyboy rag! I don’t care about brewing beer or “what my neighbors think about my brushpile”. In the 60’s and 70’s they had pieces about actually building things for (biological) boys and men. Sorry girls aren’t much interested in making soapbox racers, powering a bicycle with a starter motor or a crossbow made from a leaf spring. And their endless drooling over new military hardware and endless terrorism fearmongering suggests a deeper agenda.
After looking at that rag, I am truly disgusted with the dead trees. What a waste of paper.
I wonder if anyone has ever done a very detailed graphic showing just exactly what is involved in the production of energy from coal, nuclear, oil, natural gas, wind, solar, hydro, and whatever else. It would need to include ALL of the externals, like sourcing of raw materials, required infrastructure (transmission lines, etc.), disposal of resulting waste (batteries, nuclear waste, coal ash, etc.) and ALL of the energy requirements for all of that TOO. Then add in the actual COSTS (real ones, including all the government subsidies, “free” military security for foreign sources of oil, etc.), and the infrastructure that is ALREADY IN PLACE and paid for.
Nobody knows what these REALLY are, so nobody can truly have an educated, discussion about any of it. I guarantee that none of the clowns in our federal government know. I doubt that any of them actually care beyond who is paying their campaign costs for the next election or who is a big player in their district.
If anyone has ever seen anything like this, provide a link.
I also have never seen a full accounting of the energy inputs required. I did once sit down to try to do that myself though.. it’s impossible to get accurate information – or more that there are SO many variables that have to be summed and manipulated to even sort out one industry or regional zone. I had better luck calculating the amount of solar energy that strikes the planet each day and how much of it we actually capture via solar systems. The numbers are in a notebook somewhere lost in the cavernous recesses of my spare room, but suffice to say, it was such a small percentage as to be functionally useless. If solar was ever going to work it would need to be at a gargantuan scale and deployed as an orbital platform. That then leads to all sorts of other technical problems we haven’t even started to solve yet.
As to the actual total input cost of all energy consumed on the planet, take whatever you think it might be, double it. Then double it again because gov interference. Then add another 50% for corruption. At that point, you might be close to a fraction of the lowest end estimates. You’ll be dealing with multiples of teraJoules. That much I do remember from my attempts.
*edit – I did get to the point where it appeared to me that we have already passed the moment wherein inputs exceed outputs, somewhere around 20-odd years ago. This manifests not directly, but economically as we have so thoroughly documented here and elsewhere with the explosions of debt and imposition of negative interest rates. Those negative rates will be very, very closely aligned with the negative ROEI. Watch for it. No bullshit.*
Your 50% for corruption is probably low, more like 50% at each level of the supply and distribution chains.
Tesla / Panasonic giga factory reviewed very well. Important to know that the betteries are sized between AAA and D cell height and diameter. Connecting them PROPERLY is a big deal. Manufacturing laid out in here.
https://www.businessinsider.com/panasonic-battery-cell-operations-tesla-gigafactory-chaotic-2019-4
Green dreams are made of this, who am I to disagree?
Get your poop in a group Stossel. Don’t bother the greenies with facts.
Ask AOC to blow as hard as she can to create more energy. OOPS sorry, she already did in her precinct to get elected. Just ask any male that voted for her. Sad it did not change the environment, other than the sidewalks already filled with garbage.
I heat my big ass garage with a 150 lb capacity smoke-burning coal stove. I go up to any of the Big Sandy Terminals maybe twice each winter to hand pick the big shiny lumps and hand load about 3500 lbs each time for around $75. The ashes and clinkers are great to dump where you want to kill the weeds. Is there any other “modern” energy source that is as cheap or as easy to get?