Green Energy & Heavy Lifting

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal published a review of a book entitled Prime Movers of Globalization, written by Vaclav Smil.

Nick Schulz, the reviewer, puts Smil's book in context with these passages,

"In 1992, Mr. Gore in his book "Earth in the Balance" called for a program that would lead to the engine's elimination by 2017. He believed this was no fanciful goal; it was just a matter of practical engineering harnessed to political will.

Vaclav Smil doesn't mention Mr. Gore.....But somehow I suspect that the Nobel laureate and scourge of fossil-fuel consumption was not far from the author's mind. For if the story of these remarkable machines reveals anything, it is that Mr. Gore's vision is utterly untethered to reality."

Why? For example, Schulz quotes Smil,

"When measured in tons per kilometer, about 94 percent of global trade is now diesel-powered. The cost, efficiency reliability and durability of diesel engines offer a combination that has not been surpassed by any other energy converter."

Smil describes the effects of the gas turbine as "figuratively, the world shrank by half in a single decade." His focus on commercial shipping makes a far different point than that of moving people, i.e., trade and, therefore, wealth, increased at rates otherwise unachievable.

Schulz highlights Smil's point that our current standards of living, expectations of product and service provision, at their current or future, lower prices, are wholly dependent upon diesel-driven machines or their airborne jet counterparts.

Eliminating these literal 'engines of commerce' would not simply clean the air of the world as we now know it. They would clean the air of a world thrown back hundreds of years in terms of wealth, living styles and standards, and so much more. In short, back to an era of burning coal and wood directly at the consumer-level. But, of course, this, too, would be outlawed by the Greens. So you're probably talking about the global population reduced to using dried animal dung.

Besides this reality which is hidden by those who want to eliminate internal combustion engines is the simple fact that no green energy alternative is capable of providing similar raw locomotive power at similar performance specifications. No wind turbine, tidal energy converter or solar cell is going to power a cargo jet from Southeast Asia to America.

Thus, the unspoken agenda of Greens really is to not simply de-industrialize the globe, but to purposefully push humanity back, in a technological and lifestyle sense, several centuries.

Try putting that on a ballot and getting it passed!