A Little Energy Is a Dangerous Thing
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The word has come down from on high, and the word is
"No More Nukes". By 'on high', I mean the editorial
page of the Washington Post, and by 'word' I mean
the unconsidered acknowledgment of a popular
impulse. Nuclear power is as dead as offshore oil
drilling was after the BP gulf leak. As dead as
politicians want to make it. But you can't kill an
idea, just pass it on to someone else. While the
Washington Post wrings its black and white
hands,
China explores Thorium reactors. Thorium may not
be the solution, but giving up certainly isn't.
That's why China is doing a much better job of
"winning the future" than we are. Their leaders
actually set real world goals and explore every
possible way of getting there. Meanwhile our leaders
have become more dogmatic than those of a Chinese
dictatorship, less open to new ideas, and always
eager to pound the table for their dogmatically
unworkable ideas. If there had been a Sputnik
moment, it should have come in 1985 when our trade
deficit with China began.
China's investment in high speed rail isn't the
'Sputnik Moment', the booming economic machine that
allows it to invest in unprofitable, but promising
technologies like high speed rail is. Obama mistook
one for the other, which is as foolish as assuming
that a billionaire is successful because he has a
private jet, rather than understanding that he has a
private jet because he is successful. But when
you're over-leveraged, buying a jet won't make you
successful, what it will do is bankrupt you.
The People's Republic of China is doing what all new
companies with a hit product do, try to expand and
diversify-- to avoid an economic shift that will hit
when it can no longer count on that trade imbalance
built on cheap labor and the value of the dollar. On
the other hand, we're doing what all big companies
do when they have no plan for the future-- investing
in rebranding with a trendy new CEO, a shiny new
slogan and lots of big unworkable plans that we
partly fund and then don't follow up on.
The real issue isn't nuclear power or high speed
rail, it's that we don't plan for the future. And we
don't let anyone else do it either. Congress gobbled
up pieces of paychecks for social security, because
the average person couldn't be trusted to plan for
their own retirement, and then showed how
trustworthy it was by spending Social Security
surpluses over and over again, dooming it to
insolvency. Had the directors of a private pension
fund behaved that way, they would be facing time in
a minimum security facility. But no politician will
be dragged before a judge to explain what he did
with all that money. Instead the retirement age will
be raised, benefits will be cut, wealthier workers
will be penalized because they can be-- and
politicians will go on repeating the lie that social
security is solvent.
The Chinese leaders are no better at math than we
are. They can add up the numbers just as well we
can, but they actually look at the result. While our
leaders have long ago taken refuge in post-modern
ideas, in which morality is relative, numbers are
imaginary and following a rigid ideological agenda
is the solution to every problem. The Chinese
understood that too. They had the Little Red Book,
we have the Big Green Book. And there it says that
instead of addressing social security and creating a
friendlier business climate-- we should subsidize
high speed rail and green technology. And that will
solve everything, because that's dogma. And no one
says no to dogma.
The worst of it all is the unseriousness. The
unwillingness to think and plan ahead.
A year ago it had become common wisdom that nuclear
power was now a credible alternative. Everyone from
Paul Newman to Obama had come around to promoting
nuclear power as a safe clean alternative. Now after
the tsunami, nuclear power is dead all over again. A
year from now when memories of Japan fade and
another oil spill happens, nuclear power may make
another comeback. What does that say about a
policymaking apparatus with the attention span of
Paris Hilton? Can people who think that way lead a
competitive nation, or just ride herd on a
collapsing dinosaur by snatching up popular ideas
the way a magpie gathers pennies. There's no call
for a Sputnik moment here, just an IQ test.
There is no such thing as clean and safe energy.
Energy is inherently dangerous and polluting. Start
with a basic campfire out in the woods, and you risk
ending up with a forest fire that can swallow
thousands of acres of forest. And that's with a
small fire meant for cooking marshmallows. Now
imagine the ridiculousness of pretending that we can
have safe power when our goal is to power half the
eastern seaboard. We can have cleaner energy, but
the cleaner it is, the more expensive it is. Which
negates its usefulness. You can build a campfire
with two bucks worth of supplies. Now imagine a
cleaner campfire that costs 2,000 dollars worth of
supplies. Would you use it to roast marshmallows? Of
course not. That's why Green Energy is touted side
by side with energy efficiency, cleaner energy means
more expensive and less available energy. And that
means poverty.
All forms of affordable energy delivery have their
downside. Coal, gas, oil and nuclear. They all have
a human cost. And there's no real way around that.
Technology isn't magic. It's a set of implemented
techniques that work around the laws of the universe
to achieve human ends. It doesn't give us what we
want, but what we need. And there's always a price
to pay.
China cares nothing about pollution, we care a great
deal about it. So we regulated and regulated, until
most of our factories moved to China. Now we have
cheap imports, but no jobs. Which would have been a
fair deal, if we had chosen it. But instead it was
chosen for us by leaders who insisted that we didn't
have to compromise on either one. We could have
tough pollution regulations without losing a single
job. Well we couldn't. And when that happened, the
leaders came back and said that we didn't need those
jobs anyway. The government would pay for us to go
to college and get better jobs, cover our mortgages
and pay our bills. All we would have to do is pay
taxes. And now we have mountains of debt and no
jobs.
We didn't want nuclear power either. It was too
dangerous. So we just went on buying oil, much of it
from countries that want to destroy us. And so we
had few nuclear plants and lots of new enemies
springing up out of the ground. Now we're involved
in a global and a domestic war against them. And
nuclear power is back to being too dangerous. So is
domestic drilling. So is foreign oil. So is coal. So
is everything. And there you have the problem. It's
all dangerous. And it's all no good. The easiest
decision is to plow more money into half-baked Green
Energy proposals, until the next crisis happens. The
next best thing to doing nothing.
Real leadership is planning for the future by
balancing risk against reward, setting goals and
achieving them. A truly frightening amount of time
has passed since we had leaders who did anything
like that. Instead we have leaders who focus only on
the rewards, and are completely unable to rationally
evaluate the risks. Or even consider them. If a goal
meets with their approval, then it's considered risk
free. When they are forced to confront the risk,
they either go into denial or just cut and run. Like
children, they can only see the positive outcome.
Negative outcomes either don't exist for them or as
so frightening that they refuse any course of action
which can lead to them.
Children take refuge in dogma. The 'right' course
must yield successful results. Everything has to
pass an ideological test to determine where it fits.
A 'right' policy must work for the circular reason
that it is right. If it fails, it's only because of
sabotage from wrong-thinking people. Which means
that we must redouble our efforts to implement the
policy. That is how the Soviet Union ran itself into
a ditch. But these days we're using the same
blinders. Trying to control the marketplace by
picking winners in line with dogma. 'Green energy'
is the future because we're funding it. And we're
funding it because it's the future. Nuclear, coal
and oil are bad because they're greedy, dirty and
wasteful. Solar and wind are clean and natural.
A child's reasoning. This is what our energy policy
looks like. This is what all our policies look like.
"Stop terrorism by telling them how much we like
them", "Reform the Muslim world by making them have
elections", "Stop hate by passing laws against it",
"Pass laws to make everything cheap" and "Take away
everything dangerous so people don't hurt themselves
or each other". Do you wonder why liberals so often
use children to articulate their ideas? Is there
anything in the wisdom of the liberal program that
doesn't sound like it was thought of by a six-year
old?
We no longer consider whether things will work--
instead we decide that they must because we want
them to. And so we don't have an energy policy,
instead we run back and forth between oil, coal and
nuclear-- disapproving of all of them, while tossing
away just enough money on Green Energy for it to
bite, but not enough to actually get anywhere. The
arguments go on and lead nowhere. Because the only
meaningful policy can be formulated from an
understanding of risks and rewards.
Imagine trying to pick out a car or an insurance
policy using the same process, instead of evaluating
the product on its pros and cons, two factions would
imagine their ideal car and their ideal insurance
policy, compare and reject the actual products for
not meeting those standards, and then spend the next
twenty years trying to make their ideal car and
ideal insurance policy, with each administration
jettisoning the work of the previous one for its own
better alternative. An energy policy? It's a miracle
that we still have streets.
Japan chose nuclear power for reasons of energy
independence. As the only country to experience
nuclear war, they certainly knew the potential
consequences. They made the decision and are living
with it. And while that policy was not always
responsibly implemented, no policy ever is. In the
throes of a disaster, the Japanese people and their
government have behaved calmly and soberly-- a stark
and vivid contrast to the hysteria and foolishness
of our media and politicians who caper around like
poodles every time some event of note takes place
somewhere in the world.
Japan made a decision, we never have. Our search for
a safe decision has found that doing nothing is the
safest decision. More half-assed regulations, more
half-assed grants, more half-assed policies that all
add up to nothing. We cannot measure risk and so we
either act in a foolhardy manner or do nothing at
all. A little energy is a dangerous thing. A lot of
it is even more dangerous. The authorities do their
best to emphasize that they are in charge. The
people and industries are overregulated and
prevented from exercising any initiative. We are
moving forward, by way of the down escalator. The
Sputnik moment came and went in the 1980's. It's not
the technology that evades us, but the decision
making that would move it forward.