Five Myths of Green Energy

While government watchdogs did drugs and surfed porn, BP was busy wrecking the Gulf Coast.  Talk is turning again to "Green Energy."

I love the environment (it's where the tasty creatures are) and I am cheering for the good scientists struggling to advance "green energy." 

Despite what scientifically-ignorant charlatans like Al Gore and Van Jones say, "green energy" is simply too inefficient to compete with fossil fuels.  The science is advancing, but it's just not there yet.

Robert Bryce performs a public service by publishing Five Myths of Green Energy in The Washington Post.

Here are the Five Myths

1. Solar and wind power are the greenest of them all.
Wrong!  They are land hogs that actually destroy the environment by displacing natural habitat.

2. Going green will reduce our dependence on imports from unsavory regimes.
"China controls between 95 and 100 percent of the global market in" rare elements needed to construct batteries.

3. A green American economy will create green American jobs.

In a global market, American wind turbine manufacturers face the same problem as American shoe manufacturers: high domestic labor costs.

Meanwhile, the very concept of a green job is not well defined. Is a job still green if it's created not by the market, but by subsidy or mandate? 

Growth Energy, an industry lobby group, says increasing the percentage of ethanol blended into the U.S. gasoline supply would create 136,000 jobs. But an analysis by the Environmental Working Group found that no more than 27,000 jobs would be created, and each one could cost taxpayers as much as $446,000 per year. Sure, the government can create more green jobs. But at what cost?

Not to mention, Ethanol is Immoral.  Starving people to feed cars should give all human beings pause.  If that's not enough, the "Bio-fuels" industry destroys the biosphere, and there is not enough biosphere on the planet to support this government-sponsored corporate welfare travesty.

4. Electric cars will substantially reduce demand for oil.

Electric cars haven't been sidelined by a cabal to sell internal combustion engines or a lack of political will, but by physics and math. Gasoline contains about 80 times as much energy, by weight, as the best lithium-ion battery.

And in the absence of nuclear power, these cars that are plugged into the power grid are coal-powered.  How environmentally friendly is that?

5. The United States lags behind other rich countries in going green.

Over the past three decades, the United States has improved its energy efficiency as much as or more than other developed countries.

According to data from the Energy Information Administration, average per capita energy consumption in the United States fell by 2.5 percent from 1980 through 2006. That reduction was greater than in any other developed country except Switzerland and Denmark, and the United States achieved it without participating in the Kyoto Protocol or creating an emissions trading system like the one employed in Europe.

EIA data also show that the United States has been among the best at reducing the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per $1 of GDP and the amount of energy consumed per $1 of GDP.

This was just a sample.  Go read the whole thing here.