Holding the Greens feet to the fire.

Anti-Energy Left Comes Unglued as ‘Green Economy’ Claims Collapse

Posted By Christopher C. Horner

The anti-energy lobby, surrogates for Big Wind and Big Solar, is now backed into a rhetorical corner in its effort to impose its agenda of protecting the world from the horrors of affordable, abundant energy. Remember, although they say their objective is to use policy to force invention of Flubber or pixie dust to satisfy our future energy abundance, this doesn’t square ^[1] with their decades of saying that “If you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it” (green Energy guru Amory Lovins). ^[2]

Or that it would be “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child” (green leader, Paul Ehrlich), that “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet” (Eco-writer Jeremy Rifkin). That’s what drives them. They want you limited to stuff that doesn’t and won’t work because it doesn’t and won’t work. But to get you there they swear it will. Despite saying for decades that would actually be their worst nightmare.

You figure out which of their stated positions is the lie. I’ll wait.

In the meantime, I see again that my voice apparently occupies a frequency setting greens and other Lefties into convulsions, like Japanese children driven mad ^[3] by televised “Pokemon”. Or Kramer by Mary Hart. Media Matters offers today’s spasms, howling in selective outrage ^[4] over alleged ’selective outrage’ by Fox News Channel’s Neil Cavuto in having me on ^[5] to drill down a bit into their collapsed ^[6] claims that ‘green jobs’ subsidies create jobs.

They do. A few. Temporary jobs. At great per-job cost, incurring debt meaning taxes to pay it off, opportunity costs for the jobs not created by the more efficient private sector with the wealth taken from it for uneconomic, politically deigned uses; and, in the event they actually produce any contraptions, these require higher energy costs when we’re made to use them. Which then kill more jobs. But, hey, we hire more bureaucrats.

Before the jobs claims proved unable to pass the laugh test, they had moved off of ‘this will stop global warming!’ when it became apparent that people don’t sufficiently buy the global warming part or the (even less supportable) claim that adding windmills and solar panels would have any influence on the climate. Then came ‘energy of the future’, but we’ve reminded them ^[7] that windmills and solar panels are precisely as ‘nascent’ as the century-plus old automobile. They’re just losers.

Now, as Media Matters shows, they’re down to ‘well…oil, coal, gas and nuclear get more subsidy dollars!’. True. These meaningful contributors to our energy supply — which distinguishes them from windmills and solar panels right out of the box — do get more subsidy overall.

I’m not a pro-subsidy guy. You want some research? Let’s talk. ‘Development’, meaning deployment, which is the flag under which all of the green pork sails? Forget it. Unlike the greens, I can and do in good conscience call for an end to all subsides. Coal, oil and gas will still be here, and still be affordable (until the Obama regulatory assault ^[8] fully kicks in). Windmills and solar panels will not.

Will nuclear? No one knows, as no one has ever tried. Now, about oil, I’m not all that sure why the greens keep tossing that into the windmill/solar discussion. Other than the fact they’ve made the windmills and solar panels into political icons, as they have oil, if to opposite effect. Do they really think — or think that you do — that we get electricity from oil (or, alternately, that we drive wind- and solar-powered cars?)

It seems so given, say, their endless television ads implying and even stating that windmills and solar panels will reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Oil provides a pathetic one percent or so of our electricity…oh, sorry, wind and solar, I guess that one hit home. Maybe that’s why the comparison: comparing non-factor electricity source to like non-factors.

But here’s the rub in today’s desperation: yes, something that produces 45% or so of our electricity (coal) gets more subsidy in toto than that which produces 1%. From the silver lining department at least in ‘fossil fuels’ we are subsidizing things that contribute to our prosperity. It transfers a few cents per unit of energy from me to everyone else, including those who spend a greater percentage of their income on energy. So in that way it is the wealthier underwriting the constant upward redefinition of poverty upward, making automobility and affordable electricity more accessible.

And while a better world would be free of distortions, in the world we live in, there is only one applicable comparison. So naturally the only, and once again disingenuous, talking point the anti-energy Left has has things backward. It is this: How much does the taxpayer subsidize wind, solar, oil, coal, gas and nuclear per unit of energy produced?

This one’s gonna hurt, comrade.

According to the Energy Information Administration, before the past two years’ ‘renewables’ binge, including $90 billion in stimulus pork:

“For subsidies related to electricity production, EIA data shows that solar energy was subsidized at $24.34 per megawatt hour and wind at $23.37 per megawatt hour for electricity generated in 2007. By contrast, coal received 44 cents, natural gas and petroleum received 25 cents, hydroelectric power 67 cents, and nuclear power $1.59 per megawatt.” (h/tInstitute for Energy Research ^[9])

So, they get from 15 to nearly 100 times the relevant subsidy. That holds up pretty well globally ^[10], too

So. You’re out of arguments, gang.

The anti-energy Left wants you to have the energy you need, that is if you agree with them ^[11] that you don’t ‘need’ very much. They want energy scarcity. It is fair to say they want energy poverty.

And they are willing to say anything to get it. Except they are reduced to remarkably weak claims. Guys, your precious renewables are rat holes. They have been for decades and even over a century, depending on the rat hole. But keep eroding your credibility, because it’s clear this gravy train is about to end. And with these arguments you are taking your movement down with it.