The energy policy debate is well informed by history. So many ‘silver bullets’ being proffered by the Obama Brain Trust (‘smartest guys in the room’?) energy interventionists/transformationists are yesterday’s failures. As F. A. Hayek would put it, the Holdren-Chu approach to energy suffers from the ‘fatal conceit’ and cannot expect to be cost-effective in addressing the alleged problem.
Whither the Electric Vehicle
Take the electric vehicle versus the internal combustion engine. The market verdict of a century ago still holds–and for the same reasons. Thomas Edison was correct to pronounce the verdict to Henry Ford in 1896.
Edison himself labored to make batteries more economical for the transportation market, but the problem of weight and poor energy density could not be overcome. A news splash in 1914 by Ford Motor Company of an “experimental” car, the “Ford Electric” that would sell for $900 and have a range of 100 miles, based on Edison’s work, described as “Mr.…
“Predictions of future climate trends by Stephen Schneider and other leading climatologists, based on the prevailing knowledge of the atmosphere in the early 1970s, gave more weight to the potential problem of global cooling than it now appears to merit.”
– Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Betrayal of Science and Reason (Washington: Island Press, 1996), p. 34.
Recent attention has been paid to the coming Ice Age talk of John Holdren and Steven Schneider before they got global warming religion.
Here are some “global cooling” quotations and comments from an earlier era. While such concern was not a scientific ‘consensus,’ such as that created by the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in favor of high-sensitivity anthropogenic global warming, the Ice Age scare was a very active hypothesis that should give pause to the Boiling Age purveyors of today.…
[This excerpt from Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy prefaces a five-chapter review of energy Malthusianism from the time of Thomas Robert Malthus in the late 18th century through the Julian Simon/Paul Ehrlich debate of the late 20th century.]
“Here is a planet, whirling in sunlit space,” reads the opening of Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle against Authority, penned during the dark days of World War II. “The planet is energy,” she continues. “Every apparent substance composing it is energy. The envelope of gases surrounding it is energy. Energy pours forth from the sun upon this air and earth.”
Energy is pervasive and liberating. It moves people, makes things, and provides incalculable services. It vanquishes darkness, literally and figuratively. “Since early men ignited the first fires in caves,” it has been noted, “the unleashing of energy for light, heat, cooking, and every human need has been the essence and symbol of what it is to be human.”…