The rah-rah message out of Harry Reid’s National Clean Energy Summit 4.0 and Democratic Party pep rally on Tuesday from Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Vice President Joe Biden was:
If you can imagine it, the government will deliver it. Trust us.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu
Secretary Chu started with a recitation of all the good things Obama’s stimulus money has done for Nevada — helping finance here two solar generating facilities, two geothermal plants, 235 miles of high voltage transmission line and saving or creating 2,000 jobs. (But the Nevada Journal reports that the state’s Energy Division records show $47.2 million in federal energy stimulus grants has only created or saved 35.86 jobs in the state.)
“We find ourselves in challenging times,” Chu said. “We have to take action to reduce the federal deficit. And in these hard times there are a number of people who argue that we can’t afford to make continuing investments in clean energy. So let me argue to the contrary that indeed it is part of our American heritage that in times of stress we have not only dealt with those times of stress but we’ve also taken the longer view.”
He mentioned that during the stressful times of the Civil War the nation passed a land grand college act and Lincoln signed the Pacific railway act that led to the construction of the intercontinental railroad. He credited generous government funding.
He also mentioned Sputnik and the federally funded space race, of course.
“Let me turn to another subject and another myth,” Chu continued. “Many people say that some of the United States’ greatest technologies have come from the private sector on individual investors, that the government didn’t really play a big role. So let me talk about a few of them.”
He conceded the Wright brothers “invented” the first heavier-than-air, self-propelled aircraft, but observed that in World War I there were no American built airplanes. He credited Congress with pushing aviation innovation here by contracting with private companies to carry mail.
He admitted transistors and semiconductors were invented by private firms but the biggest customers were the U.S. military. That enabled the industry to grow.
The precursor to the Internet was government sponsored, he noted.
“So the government played an incredibly intimate role in all the technologies that led to prosperity in the United States,” Chu proudly proclaimed. “We must not lose sight of that fact.”
Ipso facto, according to Chu, the government should play a big role in financing renewable energy technology even though it is not competitive in the market.
Vice President Biden was no less visionary in his address at the clean energy confab.
Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Harry Reid
He painted pictures in the air of biotechnical accomplishments such as growing replacement human organs and limbs in a lab, superfast computers, solar power cheaper than coal, car batteries that could power a car for 300 miles, liquid biofuel, batteries that recharge in the time it takes to fill a fuel tank. All it takes is federal seed money.
“Imagine,” Biden encouraged repeatedly as he introduced each pipedream.
“We know that we have a rapidly growing population,” the veep said, “that’s going to demand more and more energy and we know that increasing energy demands sharpen competition for the finite resources like oil and gas. We also know we need to take steps to cut out the pollution that’s causing global warming.”
At one point it sounded as though Chu and Biden had the same speech writer.
“You know this negative argument we hear all the time …” Biden said. “There are naysayers in political leadership who hold the view that government has absolutely no role … I would argue that at every juncture they’ve been proved wrong.”
He mentioned the railroad and telegraph and that precursor to the Internet and President Kennedy’s vow to put a man on the moon.
“If we shrink from deciding that we are going to lead in alternative energy, renewable energy then we will be making the biggest mistake this nation has made in its entire history,” Biden concluded.
Of course, there’s never been a government program that failed, right? The government can’t file for bankruptcy — like the solar panel manufacturer in Fremont, Calif., run by an Obama supporter who got $535 million in loan guarantees from Chu’s Energy Department — it just prints more money.
Remember how big a success Jimmy Carter’s synfuels program was? Me neither.
And Chu forgot something about the Wright brothers’ story. Few people remember they had competition from the head of the Smithsonian, who had a $70,000 federal grant. When his plane crashed twice, the second time about a week before the Wright brothers’ success, he blamed “inadequate” federal funding.
The federal government has given us the Energy Department, which was to break our dependence on foreign oil but has ushered in ever-higher import ratios. It gave us the Education Department to spend multibillions of dollars to improve education, while test scores have languished. The Congress gave us No Child Left Behind, from which the Education Department is encouraging all states to seek waivers.
In the 1970s the Housing and Urban Development created a dozen “New Towns” — planned communities that all went bankrupt. The Corps of Engineers built levees that saved New Orleans from flooding, right? The Energy Department has solved the nuclear waste problem, too. Those federally mandated airbags in cars only decapitated a couple hundred children and shorter women.
The war on poverty has been won, as well as the one on drugs. Only two space shuttles blew up. Ethanol in fuel has caused only so much food price inflation. The New Deal only extended the Great Depression by a decade. The Homestead Act of 1909 gave arid land to people who did not know how to farm, which caused the Dust Bowl.
Prohibition was a huge success for bootleggers. Vietnam begat us a beautiful monument with the names of 58,000 dead Americans on it.
Now that we’ve solved the illegal immigration problem, we can move on to ObamaCare and “green” energy projects that may or may not cause health care costs and power bills to skyrocket.
Just because Biden can imagine it, doesn’t alter the laws of physics. Futurists in the 1950s thought we’d be commuting to work in flying cars by now. Perhaps the vice president can also envision time travel and worm holes in space that facilitate intergalactic travel and phasers set on stun. Perhaps renewable energy will become competitive. Perhaps there will be batteries that store the intermittent power of wind and solar generators so they don’t have to be backed up by redundant fossil-fuel-fired generators. Perhaps not.
Central planners never seem to recall things that did not quite work out.
Some of the great central planners of the past century totally transformed their countries, though there was some modest deleterious side effects such as mass murder under the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot.
Speaking of seed money: Nice cow you’ve got there, Jack. Would you like to trade it for some magic beans?
Mr. Mitchell believes that airbags are bad, that the Homestead Act was a mistake, that the Space Shuttle was a catastrophe, and that the federal government should have nothing to do with either nuclear waste nor illegal drugs.
I happen to disagree.
The airbags used in other countries have caused fewer deaths. The Shuttle was a bus covered in fragile heat shield tiles. Nuke waste was supposed to be handled by feds. Drugs should not be a criminal offense, but a health issue. Central planning seldom works and often goes tragically awry. But you are free to disagree and vote for those who promise to solve all your problems for you.
Not only all that but this new incursion into the choosing of the next technology to solve the real problem of current fuels is where this government is mistaken. Previous items like the Shuttle were simply goals set by the government, the technology’s that finally accomplished the goal were the ones that emerged and in the shuttle for sure, cost the least (lowest bidder). Moon shots also were the result of technology that worked and not tech that was selected by politics. The case with Green is the tech being pushed was not ready in the 70′s, is not ready now and wont be ready for a generation by some accounts. If our polititians would set the goal and get out of the way, a technology that is truly viable would come from the efforts of many and not the chosen few. See the Wright Brothers above for an example of that. Once proven, yes by all means government spending very much aided in price reduction by increasing the demand exponentially, but this has not and is not working for solar and wind power. The reason is simple while we can dream of green we cannot throw enough money at it to force it to function fully. We need to open up the market for the research to all types of potential fuels not just these chosen few. Yes the government has a hand in this but it does not and should not be the chooser of which tech gets researched. And yes that means stem cells too, GW was wrong about that.
The best role the government can play is to get out of the way of innovators and their potential customers.
Also, everything is about the grid. Is no one even contemplating self-sustaining home and/or business generation? Perhaps a combination of sources that could include solar, wind, natural gas and perhaps someday a mininuke.
My wordy point defined, with one exception. Once new tech has been developed the government can be a great customer for it.
Or fuel cell tech for home power generation. I know of one that seems to be on track, they got their start when the gov got out of the way as it turns out.
Putting Steven Chu’s and Joe Biden’s hyperbole aside, I would challenge either one of them to identify a single technology, developed by the Department of Energy, that has turned into a commercial success. In the 40 years I’ve had dealings with the DOE – and this goes back to its pre-cabinet post days as the Atomic Energy Commission – I’m at a loss to think of one.
…and this is the Department that is going to launch us into the rainbows-and-unicorn age of “green” renewable energy.
Unicorns-and-rainbows age … I’m going to steal that line one day.
Central planners are the bane of our existence. They take but never give.
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