Green Energy Is Dead

Stephen Moore has the totally expected news:

The green energy movement in America is dead. May it rest in peace. No, a majority of American energy over the next 20 years is not going to come from windmills and solar panels. One important lesson to be learned from the green energy fad’s rapid and expensive demise is that central planning doesn’t work.

What crushed green energy was the boom in shale oil and gas along with the steep decline in the price of fossil fuel that few saw coming just a few years ago.

In reality, green energy was never alive. It was the undead, feeding on the blood of the living.

Without profits from comparatively cheap fossil fuels, without the national economy built on inexpensive energy, Obama’s Folly would never have been possible.

Elon Musk can risk billions on new battery technology because he made billions more on PayPal — and PayPal’s server farms were made possible in large part by cheap energy. Apple can afford to convert to solar because it sells more high-profit-margin widgets than anyone else. What Musk couldn’t do was risk billions on batteries before he made those billions. For all its genius at selling consumer electronics, Apple could never make money selling all that “green” energy it produces — their solar farms are essentially vanity projects.

Speaking of vanity, Obama thought green energy could be made profitable by… well, he never really explained that part. His plan was to pump billions into alternative energy sources, while at the same time waging regulatory war on oil and coal. The diminished profits and increased costs from the latter would somehow make for increased profits and diminished costs for the former.

Somehow.

But then America’s frackers applied their creative genius to America’s shale oil, and the Saudis opened the pumps to wage economic war against Iran, and Obama’s vanity was exposed for exactly what it was.

Cool.