Should We Be Bullish on Solar?

Megan McCardle has an interesting and worthwhile piece on the likelihood of solar energy costs falling below those of conventional energies any time soon. But she finishes it with a pretty silly question...

I'd close by restating Tyler's question in a slightly different way: if the price of solar is really likely to keep falling until it's cheaper than coal, why don't we see this revealed in the behavior of global warming activists? Where are Greens saying "We've decided to move on to more pressing issues, because clearly, the carbon emissions problem is just about solved."

For some people, maybe even most, the concern is, in fact, carbon emissions. For many of the activists, however, all of the evidence suggests that the concern is not carbon emissions as much as it is concern about the consumption and lifestyle of the US population. For my entire lifetime, the people in the vanguard of this movement have responded to any proposed crisis with the same set of policy prescriptions - more central control, more rationing, less freedom for individual movement, less individual autonomy. In short, for the most dedicated of the global warming activists, carbon emission control is simply a pretext for the actual goal - socialism.

When Grizzly Bears Attack …

"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help..."

A North Idaho man killed a grizzly bear that was threatening his family. Now he could face jail time if the Obama administration has its way.

Rachel Hill looked out her bedroom window on the evening of Mother’s Day and saw three grizzly bears attacking the children’s 4H club pigs’ pen. The Hill children had been outside practicing basketball a half hour earlier, so seeing the bears concerned her and her husband, Jeremy Hill. After calling for his kids and hearing no response, Jeremy grabbed his daughter’s rifle. After once more calling for the kids, fearing they were in danger, he shot at the closest grizzly bear, which was about 120 feet away.

The other two grizzlies fled while the wounded bear began to run off in the same direction, but then turned and came towards the house. Hill shot the bear a final time due to the danger a severely wounded grizzly bear posed to his family and others. Hill called two officials with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. They came out, investigated, and unsuccessfully tried to capture the other two grizzly bears by placing bear traps on the property.

Regardless of the danger to Hill’s family, grizzly bears are listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, thus the federal government is prosecuting him. If convicted, Hill could face up to one year in prison and a $50,000 fine.

Yup. Kill a grizzly. Save a woodpecker. Send your kids to school with a lunch. Leave a pocket-knife in an emergency kit in your glove compartment. Try to buy a cold medicine that works. It's all the same. Got to make a law, got to enforce a law, because that's the only way to legislatively enact Utopia.

Not new, of course. And it's been commented on before...

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-breakers-and then you cash in on the guilt.

- Ayn Rand

As a general rule, there is no situation so bad, no condition so dire and desperate, that it cannot be made worse by those with a vision of an earthly Utopia...

Ted Turner, hypocrite

Ed Driscoll - "I wonder if the Ted’s kids — or his ex-wives — ever ask him which child he regrets the most?"

Avertible catastrophe

Remember the old adage about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good? Well, that's like the organizing principle of the environmental lobby and the Federal government.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to store it. As U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of the clean-up operation, explained in a press briefing on June 11, "We have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water--the oil has to be decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that." In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where they off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls "crazy."

If we had a leader in the White House, a President with some executive experience or even just concern about doing the right thing, the oil would still be leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, but the effects might not be quite so catastrophic...

Silent Spring Dead

Q: What's more silent than a Silent Spring?
A: The millions of dead human beings who have succumbed to malaria, dengue and other mosquito-borne illnesses over the nearly forty years since DDT was outlawed.

Outbreak of Dengue Fever Is Reported in Florida

Dengue fever, a growing scourge in the tropics, has established itself in a popular American tourist destination, federal health officials reported last week...Dengue — a mosquito-borne virus that causes joint pain so severe it is nicknamed “break-bone fever” in Latin America and Asia. According to last week’s report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Florida health authorities have since found 27 more cases, all in Key West, the last in April. Most victims had a fever and pain in the head, body and eyes, and some had a rash.

The C.D.C. advised doctors to consider a dengue diagnosis in patients with similar symptoms who have been to subtropical parts of the United States. Although there have been outbreaks along the Texas-Mexico border since 1980, the disease had not been seen in Florida since 1934.

Unlike malaria, which is caused by a parasite, dengue is a virus, and there is no cure.

Rachel Carson was not available for comment...


Every action has consequences. Rachel Carson's classic environmentalist screed, Silent Spring, was the kind of hysterical misinformation which led to the demise of DDT, the single best means of controlling the mosquito population ever invented. As a result, millions of people have gotten sick and died of malaria, dengue and other mosquito-borne diseases over the last forty years, most of them the equatorial poor. In other words, Rachel Carson is the classic liberal success story, fighting for the birds and fish at the expense of poor human beings. Celebrated for the acknowledged positive results, while the much more serious negative ramifications are unacknowledged and ignored. A hero to utopian do-gooders everywhere!

A bit of history on fossil fuel usage

An interesting piece from George Will:

in 1901, a new well named for an East Texas hillock, Spindletop, began gushing more per day than all other U.S. wells combined.

Since then, America has exhausted its hydrocarbon supplies. Repeatedly.

In 1914, the Bureau of Mines said that U.S. oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. In 1939, the Interior Department said that the world had 13 years' worth of petroleum reserves. Then a global war was fought, and the postwar boom was fueled. In 1951 Interior reported that the world had . . . 13 years of reserves.

...

Today, there is a name for the political doctrine that rejoices in scarcity of everything except government. The name is environmentalism.

Read it all...

Quote of the day

From Don Surber, noting that "Congress stop[ped] offshore oil drilling while allowing coal mining in Appalachia:"

Despite pretensions of acting locally and thinking globally, today’s environmental movement is basically a mixture of socialism, new age religion and NIMBY, NIMBY, NIMBY.