Green central planning—our hydrogen future?
In my last post, I commented on how government central planning, being subject to shifting political agendas, makes long-range economic decision-making impossible. It’s worth looking at other examples of the chaos and market distortions that government intervention causes.
Consider the government’s support for alternative fuel vehicles, which—like the solar power plants in the Mojave desert—is driven purely by green ideology. It currently doesn’t make any technological or economic sense to try to replace the petroleum-powered internal combustion engine with currently existing alternative fuel technologies. (Just as it currently doesn’t make any sense to try to replace fossil-fueled or nuclear-powered electricity with solar or wind.) Nevertheless, the government is determined to do so.
In 2003, the Bush administration launched a 1.5 billion dollar initiative to subsidize the development of hydrogen cars—cars that use hydrogen instead of gasoline as their source of energy, producing water as their only emission.
Now, there are all kinds of reasons why hydrogen cars would never make it today on a free market. Critics cite legitimate safety concerns, the high cost of hydrogen fuel cell technologies, and the need for a huge, nationwide build-out of hydrogen refueling stations. Read the rest of this entry »




The Climategate documents—the
Darwin’s masterpiece The Origin of Species was published 150 years ago today, and the truths Darwin
One argument sometimes heard in favor of green energy is that sources such as wind and solar are “free, forever.” Al Gore, in particular,
A number of developments on the climate front suggest that the tide has turned somewhat for promoters of green climate policy:
Environmentalists claim, with ever-increasing hysteria, that our consumption of carbon-based energy in pursuit of prosperity and economic growth is altering the earth’s climate. Human survival, they insist, requires the immediate abandonment of fossil fuels, which provide more than 80 percent of the world’s energy, in favor of carbon-free sources.
The Wall Street Journal recently commissioned Karen Armstrong, author of numerous books on religion, and Richard Dawkins, author of numerous books on evolution and atheism, to
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