The Energy Revolution 4: Hot Planet?

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

 

Walter Russell Mead

7/28/12

 

 

Over a series of recent posts, I’ve been looking at the energy revolution that is changing the look of the 21st centuries. Some countries are losers, but the US in particular stands to make big gains at home and in its foreign policy.

 

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But there is one group (other than the Russians and the Gulf Arabs and the Iranians) that isn’t sharing in the general joy: the greens. For them, the spectacle of a looming world energy crisis was good news. It justified huge subsidies for solar and wind power (and thereby guaranteed huge fortunes for clever green-oriented investors). Greens outdid themselves year after year with gloom and doom forecasts about the coming oil crunch. They hoped that public dislike of the Middle East and the costs of our involvement there could be converted into public support for expensive green energy policies here at home: “energy independence” was one of the few arguments they had that resonated widely among average voters.

 

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Again, for people who base their claim to world leadership on their superior understanding of the dynamics of complex systems, greens prove over and over again that they are surprisingly naive and crude in their ability to model and to shape the behavior of the political and economic systems they seek to control. If their understanding of the future of the earth’s climate is anything like as wish-driven, fact-averse and intellectually crude as their approach to international affairs, democratic politics and the energy market, the greens are in trouble indeed. And as I’ve written in the past, the contrast between green claims to understand climate and to be able to manage the largest and most complex set of policy changes ever undertaken, and the evident incompetence of greens at managing small (Solyndra) and large (Kyoto, EU cap and trade, global climate treaty) political projects today has more to do with climate skepticism than greens have yet understood. Many people aren’t rejecting science; they are rejecting green claims of policy competence. In doing so, they are entirely justified by the record.

 

 

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Curse You...Big Oil!

[Valin]

Capitol Protesters Think Fossil Fuels are a Big Fracking Deal

Enviro banjo tunes, the "Ecological Our Father," global warming condemnations and simultaneous praises of the sweltering sun, and numerous F-bomb variations on the Hill today.

Bridget Johnson

7/28/12

 

What do you get when you bring hundreds of fervent environmentalists and NIMBYs together on the west lawn of the Capitol to denounce fracking, every single fuel that originates from the ground, and, for old time’s sake, Dick Cheney?

 

You get enviro banjo tunes, the “Ecological Our Father” at the interfaith prayer service (“Our Father, who art in the forest…”), and more punny protest signs built off the F-bomb than even Joe Biden could dream up.

 

Do it on a standard hot, humid July day in D.C., and add in the global warming condemnations and simultaneous praises of the solar intensity as an endless wellspring of clean energy.

 

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Luddites

Then