“Trump Is Destroying the Future of America to Own the Libs.” So claimed the title of a recent New York Times op-ed. The author was Robinson Meyer, founding executive editor of the media company Heatmap, which focuses on “climate energy and sustainability.” Meyer attributed the administration’s turn against taxpayer-dependent energies to “Mr. Trump and his officials’ … hatred for next-generation energy technologies….” What underlies their hatred? “This campaign is primarily driven by their opposition to the solar and wind farms that they associate with their foils, the Democrats.” So, it is all to “own the libs.”
Political discussion in a Republic is supposed to be based on understanding, articulating, and rebutting your opponent’s arguments. That is the legacy of Athenian democracy, the Roman Republic, the British Parliament, and the American Founding. When an author says that his opponent is driven by nothing but an irrational hatred of the other side, he betrays that tradition. And Myers has betrayed it. He has completely defaulted on his responsibility to understand why the Trump administration is bringing to an end America’s futile multi-decade effort to prop up inferior energies.
The following may serve as a primer for a far better analysis. Start with economics and false promises. In 1983, a study for the Solar Energy Industries Association, American Wind Energy Association, and Renewable Energy Institute concluded:
The private sector can be expected to develop improved solar and wind technologies which will begin to become competitive and self-supporting on a national level by the end of the decade [1990] if assisted by tax credits and augmented by federally sponsored R&D.
The American Wind Energy Association testified before Congress in 1986 that “the U.S. wind industry has…demonstrated reliability and performance levels that make them very competitive.” A year later, a solar lobbyist testified that favorably amending the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act “is the key to making solar thermal electric generation competitive in the immediate future.”
A featured business story in the Times back in 1994 declared that Enron was making solar competitive. “The … cost of solar power generation has quietly declined by two-thirds,” the article stated, with “commercially competitive solar power” coming from “mass-producing solar panels….”
So why are solar and wind still government dependent after 15 extensions of the Investment Tax Credit and 12 extensions of the Production Tax Credit? The answer is basic energy physics. In short, the sun’s work over the ages, creating a dense, storable energy stock, is far more efficient than the dilute, intermittent flow from the sun. Oil, natural gas, and coal are plentiful, concentrated, reliable — and the natural choice of consumers in a free market with taxpayer neutrality. Compare this to wind and solar as grid electricity, which are dilute, intermittent, and fragile.
Meyers also defaults on the ecological problems of wind and solar: land and transmission intensity; avian mortality from wind turbines (what a Sierra Club official called “the Cuisinarts of the Air”); and ocean-life disruption from offshore wind installation.
“A machine in every pristine” seems to sum up the philosophy of Washington D.C.’s Big Green — versus grassroots environmentalists who are saying NO to big wind and solar. In the U.S. alone, 875 such projects have been rejected to date. Rooftop solar? Hundreds of thousands of customers of bankrupt Sunnova, SunPower, and many other firms are not happy.
Robinson Meyer opines that because of the Trump administration’s termination of support for renewables, “the United States will surrender its technological edge” to “demote America into a deindustrialized power.” Bunk. Wind and solar as grid power are on life support. It’s time — really, long past time — to pull the plug. Let consumer freedom ring; hands off taxpayers. The unhampered market will decide how best to optimize economic and environmental benefits, now and into the future.
