Trigger
Holman W. Jenkins from the Wall Street Journal recently (11/9/2013) wrote a nice article on the Opinion pages titled “Germany Reinvents the Energy Crisis/A love affair with renewables brings high prices, potential blackouts and worries about 'deindustrialization.'” (Subscription only, which is a petty!).
Mr. Jenkin’s sarcasm is on target. Sometimes other authors said it better than yourself.
Salient Excerpts
Excerpts (Emphasis added):
“Like Mao urging peasants to melt down their pots, pans and farm tools to turn China into a steel-producing superpower, Germany dished out subsidies to encourage homeowners and farmers to install solar panels and windmills and sell energy back to the power company at inflated prices. Success - Germany now gets 25% of its power from renewables - has turned out to be a disaster. As Germans rush to grab this easy money, carbon dioxide output has risen, not fallen, because money-strapped utilities have switched to bruning cheap American coal to provide the necessary standby power when wind and sun fail.”
“But more important is their subscription to resource-depletion ideology, which convinced them they’d picked a political winner ...”
“Because the bills are paid by households and businesses, electricity rates are triple those in the United States.”
“Europe’s energy crisis is a lot like ours of 40 years ago - self-inflicted.”
“Fascinating too will be the fate of Europe’s [enormous reserves of] shale. In Europe, government, not landowners [unlike the U.S.] controls and benefits from mineral resources, creating the zero-sum resource politics that have made the Mideast a paragon of stability and civil progress.”
Mr. Jenkins is also mocking some of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s naive advisers. Ms. Merkel has a P.D. in physical chemistry, but she is inept and way too opportunistic. Her and Margaret Thatcher are worlds apart.
