The False Promise of Green Energy.

• Author: Desrochers, Pierre
• Position: Book review

* The False Promise of Green Energy

By Andrew P. Morriss, William T. Bogart, Roger E. Meiners, and Andrew Dorchak

Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2011.

Pp. 289. $24.95 cloth, $11.99 eBook.

One of the main ways by which the Obama administration was to heal the planet, cool down the climate, and lower rising sea levels while increasing America's energy independence, reducing its carbon footprint, and dragging it out of the economic recession was through the creation of millions of well-paid, abundant, stable, unionized (with full benefits), healthy, environmentally beneficial, and geographically dispersed "green jobs." After all, as visionaries ranging from Anthony Van Jones to the staffers of the United Nations Environment Program have long argued, nature offers us renewable energy in abundance because the sun shines, the wind blows, the tides roll, and we live on a molten rock. Only private-sector greed, stupidity, inertia, and vested interest in old-fashioned ways blocked our road to ecotopia. From Germany and Spain to California and Texas, "constructive government partnerships" fortunately channeled much green (typically a few hundred thousand dollars per job "created or saved") toward green-job proposals. True, minor hurdles such as overturning the laws of physics and economics needed to be overcome, but what could environmental pioneers and elected officials fail to accomplish with access to other people's money?

Try as they might, however, none of these pioneers succeeded in converting the Green Job Kool-Aid into an affordable, convenient, and reliable energy drink, and the government's "green venture capitalists" failed to discover profitable free-range, grass-fed unicorn producers. As has been obvious since coal-powered steam engines displaced windmills, a modern economy cannot be built on a foundation of countless little distant, costly, intermittent, unreliable, and low-density power sources. Among other problems, even in some allegedly desirable locations the sun shines and the wind blows only about 10 percent of the time. Wind might be free, but the construction, installation, and maintenance of wind turbines are not. Locations with abundant (yet far from being sufficient or reliable) wind are often frequented by charismatic migratory birds (who are there for the free ride) and far from urban markets, thus mandating both massive increases in transmission and production capacity because the longer electricity travels, the more...