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--By George Mason |
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Prissy, Puritanical and Pagan The environmental movement believes that the Bush administration has handed them a glorious fund-raising opportunity. They are right. Successful direct mail campaigns need to have an enemy. Arsenic and ANWR are it. Dick Cheney believes in rational thought, accurate science, private property, economic growth and balanced free market solutions to conservation issues. He knows that any growing economy needs additional energy supply. In the hysterical world of environmental activists, none of these considerations matter. The current crop of Eco-activists seems to have just one priority beyond self-perpetuating fund-raising. They make their living by promoting government welfare for the educated. At least that is what the DOE Task Force on Strategic Research and Development concluded in 1995. With Americans looking at what they have created in California, the green forces need to divert and distract the energy and environmental debate. A balanced discussion free of fear and loathing might make the American people realize that the 20-year environmental attacks on fossil fuels have produced nothing but unworkable solutions damaging to people, their property and their chances for personal economic well-being. Every expanding economy needs cheap and plentiful energy. That’s the basis of prosperity. At the core, a significant portion of environmentalists think that people should move to California, live in something akin to Ted Kazinski’s cabin and bike on over to the rally attacking the use of fossil fuels. If that’s not their dream, our friends and neighbors will have to come to grips with the fact that their future prosperity depends on hybrid turbine natural gas generators connected to short transmission lines near their homes and offices. There is something else they will have to understand. The current energy conflicts have been created by government policy failure and not free market failure. Energy price controls don’t do just two things. They do four. A fixed retail price for electricity increases demand (it costs no more per unit to use all you want) and it diminishes supply (there is no profitable reason to invest in expansion to meet higher demand). The third effect of price controls is that they also create huge financial pressures on taxpayers and ratepayers to spend unseen "non-billable" dollars to make up for government-created market distortions. That real but unnoticed expense goes to funding open-ended subsidies, mandates and preferences. The fourth thing, of course, is that price controls give government an influential role to play in the marketplace. The lefty attitude on every issue is "Well, all-in-all, we think things would be better if we gave the answer." California, with its Third Way politics, is the clearest place to go for examples to bolster the argument. It is there that we find the dimmest bulbs and the greatest smog. Wind Farms. The Bay Area of San Francisco is known as the windmill bird-death capital of America. The National Audubon Society has been calling for a moratorium on new construction on the grounds that wind farms are both bait and executioner for all birds including federally protected species, such as the Bald Eagle, that it is a prosecutable crime to kill. Wind farms have very high up-front construction and acquisition costs. They must be located in isolated areas which implies high investment costs for extended transmission lines. Since electricity cannot be stored, wind farm efficiency is no more than one-quarter of that of a gas-fired combined cycle plant. That’s because wind does not blow around the clock. It does not blow at peak speeds at times of peak demand, either. As a result, the average cost of production over five years is approximately double the cost of gas and triple the cost of spot market purchases. Wind farms take up lots of land (85 times more space that an equivalent gas-fired plant), destroy the view from afar and the eardrums nearby. A perpetual "infant industry," operators measure success by the size of their government subsidy. Oh yes, electrical shorts caused by exposed wires and flaming birds cause fires. Wind farms produce about 1/10th of one percent of the U.S. electricity market. Solar Farms. Boasting a bird kill per megawatt ten times greater that the champion wind farm at Altamont Pass, California is no small achievement. Solar farms do it with mirrors. They birds are attracted to them and collide with the shiny picture-like heliostats that collect the sun’s rays. This is an industry that would never exist without federal tax credits, accelerated depreciation schedules and tax-free industrial development funds for construction. The installed equipment investment may run 20 times greater than a gas-fired plant. Construction is dense, creating horrid visual pollution while the solar farm takes as much as 300 times the land of a gas plant. Of course, there is no electricity at night and reduced generation on cloudy days. Therefore, efficient sites are hard to come by. That makes long transmission lines a necessity. Experimental projects funded by DOE proved so costly that costs per kWh were never revealed. Local environmentalists complain about the displacement of desert species and distracting visual blight. Bulk station electricity (solar power generated at a large scale central location and transmitted on a power grid to multiple users) represents about one-fifth of one percent of U.S. capacity. Hydroelectricity. Some 80 percent of the electricity generated by renewable resources comes from falling water. Hydropower is about a ten percent share of U.S. electrical generating capacity. (Nuclear power, also a creature of government subsidies, has 20 percent. Coal a little over 50.) In the last ten years new hydroelectric construction has been condemned as invasive of nature, harmful to fish and dangerous to local communities in the event of a dam failure. Since 1955, "hydro" has been loudly condemned by the left as a "politically incorrect renewable" and the destruction of dams and restoration of waterways has been an official position among some environmental activists. Typically, hydropower is the cheapest option available. The dam construction was long ago and subsidized by the federal government. The best sites are taken. New sites, if available, would cost as much as six times a gas plant expense. When the renewals of federal licenses come up, environmental activists are fond of demanding new waterway investments that raise the cost of electricity in the name of fish. Then there is silt. Negawatts. Energy guru Amory Lovins popularized the term "Negawatts." It means that conservation should be viewed as a source of energy. Conservation, in this view, is no less a source of energy than fossil fuels. In response to Lovins writings, the nation’s utilities spent $15.1 billion on ratepayer-subsidized electricity conservation programs between 1989 and 1995. The DOE chipped in another nine billion dollars. The Energy Information Administration did two studies on the total costs and benefits of these programs. They found that no program showed benefits greater than costs. Most programs showed benefits no more than 25 percent of costs. Subsidized energy, the study concluded, was about twice as expensive as generated power. They particularly noted that the utility’s budget commitment makes for a conflict between environmental activists and ratepayer advocates who represent low-income consumers and want lower prices instead. The California Lesson. The report Renewable Energy – Not Cheap, Not Green by the Cato Institute’s Robert Bradley, is the source of all figures used in this column. Published in 1997, the report reached a conclusion that has been verified by California’s current condition.
President Bush is headed for Europe next week. Part of his schedule is a meeting with 15 European Union nations in Gotesborg, Sweden. The delegates will insist that Bush account for a consensus of scientists who agree that human activity is the cause of a rise in global temperatures. Reading beyond the Executive Summary of the latest United Nation report reveals that no one knows whether the temperature rise is a trend or part of a cycle, the percent of the rise that can realistically be assigned to human activity or whether a rise is harmful or beneficial at a particular geographic location. The rejected Kyoto solution would have required the U.S. to shackle its growth and possibly induce an economic recession by enacting highly restrictive greenhouse gas emission regulations. At the same time, 80 percent of the world’s countries would be specifically exempt from the rules, including China and India. Greenhouse gases migrate so where they originate is irrelevant. The EU nations, which have refused to implement the protocols themselves, will be insisting that Bush ought to agree to turn the whole nation into a California or worse. Prissy, puritanical and pagan, the green activists have nothing to offer that compares to the efficient and high tech use of fossil fuels. Hopefully, the Bush team will insist that it’s the greens that cause blackouts. Over time, markets have a way of rooting out foolishness. It’s only governments that are wedded to perpetuating it.
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