Bruddah IZ
DA
The Green New Deal
The Green New Deal, mocked for some of its more absurd initial suggestions, such as abolishing airplanes and cows, is a top-down government-planning industrial-policy nightmare. It proposes over twelve years to:
(1) Require that 100 percent of power be provided by renewables. Impossible. Wind and solar now account for just 8 percent and, despite all the subsidies and mandates, are not projected to reach even 30 percent for several decades. Intermittent wind and solar require backup if electricity is to be reliably provided, and that will come from fossil fuels. The only renewable alternatives are hydroelectric power and nuclear power. Together they account for more than three times the power from wind and solar, of which nuclear accounts for two-thirds but will decline with impending plant retirements. We should be using more, not less, nuclear power, but it cannot be expanded quickly for a host of reasons, from a dearth of young nuclear engineers in the pipeline to permitting red tape. In any event, it
is strongly opposed by most environmentalists, as are more dams. California’s legislature and regulators are so captured by the solar and wind lobbies that hydro is excluded from meeting renewables standards, and of the state’s two nuclear power plants, one is shuttered and the other likely soon will be.
Finally, battery storage is beyond prohibitively expensive, costing many trillions of dollars because of the required scale. Decades of publicly funded university and national lab—and private—research has not resulted in sufficient progress. Worse yet, massive amounts of rare earth minerals and a huge expansion of lithium production from China, or huge costs and significant time to discover, produce, and scale output from Australia, Brazil, and the United States, would also be required to produce the magnets for wind turbines and the batteries for electric cars.
The Green New Deal, mocked for some of its more absurd initial suggestions, such as abolishing airplanes and cows, is a top-down government-planning industrial-policy nightmare. It proposes over twelve years to:
(1) Require that 100 percent of power be provided by renewables. Impossible. Wind and solar now account for just 8 percent and, despite all the subsidies and mandates, are not projected to reach even 30 percent for several decades. Intermittent wind and solar require backup if electricity is to be reliably provided, and that will come from fossil fuels. The only renewable alternatives are hydroelectric power and nuclear power. Together they account for more than three times the power from wind and solar, of which nuclear accounts for two-thirds but will decline with impending plant retirements. We should be using more, not less, nuclear power, but it cannot be expanded quickly for a host of reasons, from a dearth of young nuclear engineers in the pipeline to permitting red tape. In any event, it
is strongly opposed by most environmentalists, as are more dams. California’s legislature and regulators are so captured by the solar and wind lobbies that hydro is excluded from meeting renewables standards, and of the state’s two nuclear power plants, one is shuttered and the other likely soon will be.
Finally, battery storage is beyond prohibitively expensive, costing many trillions of dollars because of the required scale. Decades of publicly funded university and national lab—and private—research has not resulted in sufficient progress. Worse yet, massive amounts of rare earth minerals and a huge expansion of lithium production from China, or huge costs and significant time to discover, produce, and scale output from Australia, Brazil, and the United States, would also be required to produce the magnets for wind turbines and the batteries for electric cars.
