It's Alive!(Letters) (Letter to the editor)

• Author: Green, Kenneth P.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Ronald Bailey's article on renewable energy ("It's Alive!," June) proves the adage that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. As Bailey points out, governmental interventions in energy markets have had a remarkably consistent pattern of failure, often attended by perverse consequences such as last year's corn-ethanol-induced run-up in food prices. There's every reason to think that the expanded Obama agenda will simply result in bigger, costlier failures with still more perverse consequences.

To be fair to Jimmy Carter, though, Obama's plan--with cap and tax at its heart--is vastly more ambitious (and disaster-prone) than anything Carter might have contemplated. It's one thing to blow a few billion on synfuel projects and the like. It's another to double electricity prices and strangle conventional energy development until the lights go out.

Kenneth P. Green

Resident Scholar

American Enterprise Institute

Washington, DC

Ronald Bailey's analysis of contemporary energy alternatives does not address the subject of "capacity factor," which is the percentage of installed generating capacity...