America’s Green Quagmire

The notion that we should move to a war footing on energy has been a reigning cliché of U.S. politics ever since Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office energy crisis address in 1977. “This difficult effort will be the ‘moral equivalent of war’ — except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not to destroy.” Ever since, we’ve been hearing that green must become the new red, white, and blue. It’s difficult to catalogue all of the problems with this nonsense. For starters, the mission keeps changing. Is the green-energy revolution about energy independence? Or is it about fighting global warming? Or is it about jobs? For most of the last few years, the White House and its supporters have been saying it’s about all three. But that’s never been true. If we wanted energy independence (and I’m not sure why we would) or if we wanted to reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil (a marginally better proposition, given that Canada and often Mexico supply the U.S. with more oil than Saudi Arabia), we would massively expand our domestic drilling for oil and gas and our use of coal or carbon-free nuclear. That would also create lots of jobs that can’t be exported (you can’t drill for American oil in China, but we can, and do, buy lots of Chinese-made solar panels). As for the windfall in green jobs, that has always been a con job...more