The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

The late and decidedly unlamented five year or 10 year or 20 year environmental plan of the Biden administration to transform America's evil addiction to fossil fuels into a beautiful garden of unicorns and pixies and lovely and abundant clean energy ran into two problems: Reality, and Donald Trump.

Reality came in the form of physics and economics; fossil fuels are incredibly energy dense, easily transported, the industry is amazingly efficient, and the fuel is cheap! Contrast that with the mess that is the current state of battery technology, the high cost of heating with electricity, the inability to transport that energy to its intended users, the pathetic range of EVs, and the awful environmental impact of just about everything involved with this massive worldwide boondoggle, and it's an easy decision.

Of course, our highly educated and profoundly stupid elites made the wrong decision, and that's where we needed Donald Trump. Physics and economics would have eventually saved the day, but not before countless billions more dollars were wasted on unproven or simply impossible technology, and with that the destruction of our superb energy production and distribution systems.

Within days of his inauguration, Donald Trump made it abundantly clear that the future of energy in America was not some pie-in-the-sky nonsense about solar/wind/tidal generation that can never supply the demands of our current economy, much less the hopefully growing economy of the future. The only way to do that is to decrease significantly total demand while increasing cost, and that is an economy and society-killing plan.

Sort of like Western Europe!

The Heartland Is Tearing Off Biden's Green Energy Shackles

A green company’s years-long effort to use the power of eminent domain to seize farmland in the Plains States was derailed after Republican South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden signed legislation on March 13 barring the condemnation of private property for the construction of a CO2 pipeline.

Iowa-based Summit Carbon Solutions’ $4.5 billion, 2,100-mile climate project envisaged pumping 12 million tons of carbon dioxide captured annually at Midwestern ethanol plants across five states – Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota – via a highly-pressurized pipeline before burying it deep underground in North Dakota.

Dubbed the “CO2 pipeline,” the project is part of a larger carbon capture and storage scheme, a taxpayer-subsidized investment fad touted to help heavy industries reach the Biden administration’s goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) supported the technology by offering participating companies a tax credit of up to $85 per ton of CO2 emissions captured and stored.

But the top-down diktats of the federal leviathan are a thing of the past. And those hugely expensive tax credits and graft-filled green energy grants are going away as well. If green energy is actually possible for a 1st World economy, then it must pass economic muster, and that means it must compete on the same level as every other energy source. And if that means that EVs are a thing of the past, or a plaything for the wealthy, then so be it. We have no responsibility for the financial success of any product, much less ones that would not exist were it not for massive government subsidies (read: a big tax on us).

It's time to return to market pressures as the primary measure of success. If Tesla fails...oh well! And if Tesla or any other green energy company succeeds on the merits? Fantastic! We will all have more choice!

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter and X/Twitter] And the Apple and Spotify feeds for CJN's podcast should be working!

posted by CBD at 11:00 AM

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