The Stupidity of "Clean Energy Economy"

Whoever says "the country that leads in clean energy will lead the global economy" is a poor economist, or a liar. Maybe both.

This is because it is a false statement... a correct perspective would be "whatever country has cheap, abundant energy will have an economic advantage."

The "economy" doesn't know if the energy that powers it is green or not, but it does respond to how much of it is available, and how much it costs (how much effort it requires per unit produced).

What converting to a "green energy" economy simply means is that we would pay more for energy. We have energy now, but what liberals want is for people to pay a higher amount of money for the same product, thus causing people who aren't rich to use less of it. This will create jobs for people in the wind and solar industry, and hurt people in all other industries, because it takes money away from everything else and hinders abundance.

If "green energy" was appealing, they wouldn't need cap and trade laws to force people or businesses to use it.

Let's say right now, to power a home in the U.S., it costs $200 per month. And let's say that if we cap carbon emissions and set mandates of percentages for renewable energy sources like wind and solar, it causes the cost of powering a home to rise to $400 a month. What effects will this have?

It will cause people to have to spend more time working to pay for the same end product that they already had before. If you make $100 per day, you now have to work for 4 days per month instead of 2 days to power your home. That leaves us $200 less per month to spend on products of other industries, and thus hurts all industries except wind and solar.

Policies such as these hinder abundance. Liberals don't realize that most of their policies hinder abundance, but if you force people to buy electricity from more expensive sources, and money is limited, less of that electricity can be paid for and thus produced. Wind and solar are some of the most expensive sources of electricity known to man, because they require tremendous effort for relatively little energy... compared to something cheap like coal, which is higher energy output for less effort. With less of a resource to go around because it requires more "effort" (has a higher cost), living standards are lowered, because people will be forced to use less of it.

When you say "green energy creates jobs," what you truthfully mean is "green energy takes jobs away from other industries and adds jobs to inefficient energy production."

Imagine an efficient shoe company can sell shoes at 25 dollars a pair, and another more inefficient shoe company sells identical shoes at 50 dollars a pair. The efficient shoe company employs 1,000 people, and the inefficient shoe company employs 2,000. The poor economist would say, "hey, if we force everyone to buy from the inefficient shoe company, and they expand operations, we will create jobs, because they employ more people per shoe produced." What the poor economist doesn't realize is that it hurts anyone buying shoes because it requires them to pay a higher cost per shoe, hurts all other industries since there is now less money to spend on everything other than shoes, and hinders abundance because they are putting more workers and effort into creating the same product that could be produced more efficiently with less people. If the same number of shoes produced could be made in a more efficient way with half the people, the other 1,000 could be working to produce something else, and thus contributing to abundance.

Likewise, if you subtract 1,000 people away from the coal industry which (for the sake of example) produces 2 units of energy per worker, and add them to the wind turbine industry which produces 1 unit of energy per worker, you are just hurting all industries other than the wind industry, and hindering the abundance of energy. More people are working to produce the same amount of what we already had. More effort, higher costs, lower living standards.

And besides, wind power takes a ridiculous amount of land to implement... so not only does it make energy costs rise, but it renders thousands of square miles of land unusable and deforested.

I though green energy was supposed to save the environment!

Sounds like a bad deal to me.