My esteemed Keloland Colleague, Todd Epp, has a thought provoking post on energy. That's another way of saying I disagree with almost everything he says. Or at least the part after the confession.
Oil will continue to be part of the energy equation for the foreseeable future. But the sooner the United States embarks on meaningful government funded research and development on biofuels, hydrogen, solar, wind, and other "green" energy solutions, we will continue to be held hostage by exorbitant fuel prices, multi-national corporations, unfriendly foreign governments--and our own laziness and lack of will.
I am not sure what "meaningful" means in this context, except for more expensive. But consider the items in Todd's list. Contrary to popular belief (and George W. Bush is included here), hydrogen is not a potential energy source. You start with water and you end up with water. That's sounds clean and it may be; but applying the laws of thermodynamics, it means that the energy it takes to separate hydrogen out has to be greater than that what you will get back from burning it. Hydrogen may become a very useful and clean means of storing energy, but it can't solve the basic problem.
Government investment is biofuels is meaningful if anything is, and it has given us ethanol. God knows I love it, as it is helping to fuel the South Dakota economy; but it may prove to be one of the most disastrous environmental policies in decades. At present, the ethanol industry consumes a lot more energy than it adds back, so it is hardly helping.
The same is true for wind power, which is a technological means of turning air currents into government dollars. Wind power may become modestly viable in the future; but the obstacles to it as a serious source of power are horrendous, and this make it very unlikely that it will ever be more than a very marginal contribution. For now it is a net loss. Solar energy may be more promising over the long run, at least as a source of small scale generation.
The problem with "meaningful" or sub-meaningful government investment in such things is that it tends to be driven entirely by two forces tangential to the problem it addresses: what sounds sexy and nice (wind and sun, good!), and what constituencies can cash in. Neither of these things is tied to any actual payback in energy production. The companies that are investing in wind power are doing so for the sake of tax breaks. They are all but uninterested in selling their meager output of electricity. So long as government subsides keep corn prices high, producers don't have to care about the cost-benefit analysis of ethanol policy.
The difficulty in trying to generate "green" energy is illustrated by the experience of one Al Gore. Last February he was criticized for the fact that his home has a very large carbon footprint, larger than most neighborhoods. So Gore had all kinds of green technologies installed at his home. The result? His personal energy use surged by 10%. It's very challenging to calculate the real outcomes of any technology.
But it's easy to tell how much it costs in dollars. The free market is not the answer to every problem, but it is obviously the answer to this one. As energy costs rise, two things are going to happen: producers will become more efficient at finding and extracting energy, and consumers will become more efficient at consuming it. I think those two processes will continue to meet our needs indefinitely, but that of course is speculation. All we can say for certain is that they have been the engine of economic growth in every society since the industrial revolution began.
I don't think there is anything wrong with government investments in technology research. If the state can pay Professor Schaff's salary, it can do other useless things with its money. Some good may even come of it. But it's contrary to all evidence and reason to think that it will lead to "energy independence."
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