The Problem With “Green” Energy

(The following was originally a Facebook comment in response to this article.)

This is the problem. Everyone wants the whole world to “go Green” on the unstated, utterly impossible premise that all forms of energy are equal, and that the only reason we use one over the other is some big conspiracy somewhere. Most of the people talking — and encouraged to talk by leftist politicians and by industry people looking for huge government subsidies — don’t have the slightest idea about different forms of energy: they’ve just been fed this big bill of goods and spew out simplistic demands that are wholly infeasible.

We use oil because there’s lots of it, it’s a liquid (so you can store it in a tank), and it produces a LOT of energy when you burn it. Ethanol produces a LOT less energy when you burn it, and takes a LOT more energy to produce in the first place (not to mention, we use corn to produce it, so we’re driving up the price of food for millions of starving people).

But wind and solar are FAR worse, for reasons the vast majority has never thought of in its simple little life: as you’ve pointed out, there’s no good way to store it, AND you can’t transmit it over long distances because electric wires are like leaky pipes. The longer the journey, the more you lose. And the journey required to lose WAY too much is pretty darn short.

The real solutions are oil, natural gas and coal. Maybe nuclear. And we’ve now found ways to produce so much natural gas it’s just crazy, so even if we didn’t have lots and lots of the other two (and we do, actually), the natural gas discoveries just in the past five years completely change the future of American energy, radically for the better.

But the Green lobby doesn’t want that. It’s too invested in things that don’t work, largely because those things have been made popular through lies about their actual capabilities and problems, which makes it possible to get huge government subsidies (corporate welfare), which then lines the pockets of guys like Al Gore who did the popularizing in the first place. It’s as corrupt as heck. And it’s time we blow the lid off it.

Rod D. Martin is a leading futurist, technology entrepreneur, author and activist from Destin, Florida. He was part of PayPal’s pre-IPO startup team, serving as special counsel to founder and CEO Peter Thiel, and also served as policy director to former Governor Mike Huckabee. He is Founder and CEO of The Martin Organization, whose portfolio of companies includes Galectin Therapeutics (NASDAQ: GALT), Advanced Search Laboratories, Proxomo Software, Agincourt Ventures and the 10 X Fund.  His charitable and church work is central to all he does, and he further engages our culture as President of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA), as founder of The Vanguard Project, as a widely sought-after speaker and as author of such books as his forthcoming The Imperative of Excellence.

Tagged as: Energy, Fracking, Green Movement, Oil, Radical Left, Wind Power