Ending the Green New Deal

Is the “Green New Deal” – a progressive’s erotica – failing? Well, yes and no.

It is failing in the market place. But at the same time it continues to grow under governments’ anti-economic mandates. Now isn’t that a heck of a note. To use a term often used in bridge -let’s review the bidding.

Electric vehicles are failing in the automobile market place largely because there are only a limited number of buyers with sufficient discretionary incomes to ignore the real economics of electric vehicles in favor of the virtue signaling that comes with such purchases. And we still do not know the full cost of electric vehicles because we are just now coming into that period where original purchases are being resold, reconditioned (all new batteries) and/or junked (with the cost of disposal of the batteries*). In our fifty-five plus golf course community there are more Corvette muscle cars than there are Teslas and other EV’s – and the differential would be even greater if the Corvettes got the same massive government subsidies at every level of production and sale as do the EV’s. In other words the discretionary market for electric vehicles is saturated and absent new government imposed mandates and subsidies it is unlikely to grow.

But more than that, it is a reminder that government interference in the market place most often fails. But its failure reaches way beyond the production and sale of electric vehicles. As usual, progressives and government bureaucrats never consider the secondary effects of their decisions. They only know that they have the power to impose uneconomic decisions on the market and the rest be damned. In this instance, the governments failed to consider four critical things in its demands to eliminate gas powered vehicles – and let’s not kid ourselves, that is the goal – as a singular means of effecting climate change:

• The source of clean electric energy production to meet the increased demand occasioned by the growth in electric vehicles
• The means of delivering the increased clean electric energy produced to the consumers – the current electric grids are insufficient both in capacity and location.
• The methods, cost and longevity of disposal of the batteries that power electric vehicles
• The extraordinary cost of vehicle repair as a result of accidents that often include damage to the batteries.

And yet while the bloom has come off the rose for those paying attention in America, on a global basis among the government elites, the progressive continue to press. Starry-eyed progressives simply assumed the availability of sufficient electricity. After all they can plug in their their spas, heat their swimming pools and air condition their garages at the flip of a switch. And when they were reminded that eighty-percent of power is generated by fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or hydroelectric dams – the latter two being virtually carbon free – they simply shrug and rattle off wind generation and solar power while demanding that coal fired power be closed, hydroelectric dams be removed, and nuclear power plants be closed and/or never built again. The same people that demand clean energy are the same people who seek to ban the construction of power lines between the source (i.e. wind mills in Eastern Oregon) and the point of consumption (i.e. Portland and the Willamette Valley which constitutes seventy percent of the population and an even greater percentage of electricity consumption). Really, how can seemingly well-educated people be so clueless in their decision making?

These same green power zealots are undeterred by the massive failures of wind generation. It’s not that you cannot generate electricity by wind powered turbines. Rather that is the single most unreliable method of generation. One only has to take a drive through the San Gorgonio Pass between Palm Springs and Los Angeles to see the thousands of windmills and the hundreds idled, broken or being dismantled. The same is true in travel along both sides of the Columbia River, or the plains of Easter Montana and Eastern Wyoming and all through the Great Plains. There is an abundance of wind that is sometimes too mild to turn the massive 92 foot blades made of concrete like epoxy composites and often too strong to allow them to drive the generators (too fast will tear of the generators0. The wind farms are often populated by broken, decommissioned and damaged wind mills. Now projects, particularly involving more reliable off shore winds, are being abandoned on a massive scale – sometimes because of the cost of construction and maintenance – but also because of political influence of the rich and powerful who do not want their ocean views blighted by these monsters. In marked contrast the environmental industry that was build up around protecting the inhabitants of seas (whales, seals, salmon, etc.) remain largely silent about the maritime destruction caused by the construction of the wind mills, since their funds depend on the goodwill of those same rich and powerful demanding that wind generation be built elsewhere (NIMBYs).

Solar power remains a viable option but it requires massive acres of land upon which to place the solar panels. The Southwest deserts have large, uninhabited sections of land and plentiful sunshine which can generate power during the day but not the night making it really a supplemental power source as opposed to a primary source. But even at that, people are beginning to ask the pertinent questions about the secondary effects of massive solar farms on the underlying fauna and flora of the great American deserts and the costs, both primary and secondary of transmitting the power from the point of origin to the point of consumption. Now, twenty years into this evolution, those that should have asked originally are being forced to ask the questions that should have been asked at the inception.

The reason for this is that, like so many other things when government mandates something that the free market will not undertake voluntarily, is that all such actions have both a primary and secondary effect on the economy. For instance, the manufacture of solar panels requires someone to design, produce and construct solar panels at plants that require design, construction and operation of plants – including the selection of siting – which in turn requires contractors to build the plants, which in turn requires suppliers to acquire, refine and deliver the material for the construction and so on and so forth until we get to the end of the line where the people who populate these various stages need food to be grown, processed, and delivered by grocers. The point is that decisions cannot be made in a vacuum and yet they have been for nearly two decades. And we know this because as of this day there is insufficient power generation facilities, electrical grids, and maintenance capabilities to fuel the green energy delusion. In this instance the government has not only placed the cart (electric vehicles) before the horse, it has placed the horses in the wilderness with no map to get there.

And yet while all of this hand-wringing about climate change proceeds we are being led around by the likes of John Kerry and Greta Thunberg. The former a practicing hypocrite who uses private jets to tour the world and dine with would be celebrities seeking to burnish their public virtues, and the latter a child who commands “outrage” at the drop of a hat. The most interesting note is that neither of them have ever held a job upon which they have depended to put food on the table and a roof over their heads.

Worse yet we have to listen to Mr. Kerry preach the gospel of climate change but excepting out the two largest climate polluters (China and India) from any responsibility; preferring instead to blame and impose singularly on the United States and some European countries. The latest being a commitment to pay other nations for whatever damage is being done by climate change – whatever that encompasses. This is akin to trying to keep your lawn weed free while your neighbor grows dandelions and then paying your neighbor because he cannot grow grass.

The good news is that people are beginning to get a belly full of the progressives and their zest for moving money out of your pocket and into someone else’s after siphoning off a portion to pay themselves, their friends and the bureaucrats they support. The bad news is that the continuation of this outrage is our fault. We keep returning these people to public office – just like Portlanders continue to return those who have caused, ignored and/or aided the destruction of Portland, who marched with the rioters, who defunded the police, who turn criminals out on to the streets and who refuse to prosecute criminals based on the color of their skin, their religion and/or their political beliefs.

This is a problem that can only be solved when you get tired enough to throw the progressives out of office and ensure that they will never return – as they always do because they are single minded while we have other responsibilities to our families, our jobs and our businesses. The elections of 2024 are just around the corner. Stand up, shout out and vote.

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* When you replace the batteries in an electric golf cart there is most often a “fee” for disposal of the old and useless batteries.