Progress: Canadian Senate Listens to Global Warming Skeptics
Yes, on the big points. No on the little one.
The trivial problem – efficiency. It is important for apples and apples, but less so between differing technologies. An explanatory example: Assume we invent a 100% efficient carbon burning energy generating machine. (They will come after us with butter fly nets, this is impossible.) The bad news; assume it only can burn diamonds, no other form of carbon works. Keep your day job.
The big point – cost. Cost is vital to all life sustaining technologies, and the sole measure, in a free economy, is price. What will it cost me? There are many slick hucksters who hide real costs so engineers invented a term, “all in costs” (first cost, fuel costs, maintenance costs, etc), and spread it over the life of the profit making investment. For alternate energy systems, which are pushed by government, their costs are transferred to the taxpayer, via various accounting tricks, e.g mandated purchases, grants, etc. Your light bill is small but your taxes, or deficits (your grand kids taxes) go up. Since energy is ubiquitous, in every aspect of advanced society, if energy costs increase, all marginal investments, and jobs, die off. Poverty and industrial weakness, is the certain long term result.
The common weakness of all alternative energy technologies is that they are very expensive for base loaded supply. This is not due to scaling issues, or maturing R&D, the inherent technical processes are lousy. Barring another Einstein, they will always be lousy.
The cheapest means of generating electricity, after a century of refining the technology, sits on two fuels, carbon and uranium. Currently some 90% of the costs of generation are mandated by government regulations, and the trend is upward. The cost of power plants under these rules became so expensive, the government cost regulators, normally state PUCs, would not permit the prices to passed on to the customers, for the gold plated systems. America quit building power plants (except government plants which rely on loop holes.)
This up and down conflict, regulatory costs landing on the economy, is killing us. It has driven our heavy industry (energy intense users) off shore. We no longer can make things at home.
The life or death decision before us is whether to next regulate the primary reaction of carbon combustion; it produces CO2. No one knows how to price CO2. If it is bad, hence heavily penalized, carbon is no longer a useful fuel. Since 85+% of all our energy comes from carbon, your day job and millions of others will cease to make money. You will be terminated.
