He’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen.

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That quote was from Harry Truman, and he was speculating on the imminent presidency of Dwight David Eisenhower. And it was brought to mind by a WSJ op-ed from Steve Milloy: A Quiet Refutation of ‘Net Zero’ Carbon Emissions.

“Net zero” and its corollary, the “energy transition,” are talked about so often and so loosely that many take them for granted as worthy goals that could be accomplished with greater buy-in from political and business leaders. But two new reports from the utility industry should put an end to such loose talk.

In September, the Electric Power Research Institute, the research arm of the U.S. electric utility industry, released a report titled “Net-Zero 2050: U.S. Economy-Wide Deep Decarbonization Scenario Analysis.”

The EPRI report concludes that the utility industry can’t attain net zero. “This study shows that clean electricity plus direct electrification and efficiency . . . are not sufficient by themselves to achieve net-zero economy-wide emissions.”

In other words, no amount of wind turbines, solar panels, hydropower, nuclear power, battery power, electrification of fossil-fuel technologies or energy-efficiency technologies will get us to net zero by 2050.

So basically we have a bunch of central planners saying "Do this! Do that!". And it won't happen.

Fun—actually sobering—fact from Alex Epstein, as quoted by Bryan Caplan:

To give you an idea of how long it will take to scale up nuclear, to replace all existing fossil fuel energy (of all kinds) with nuclear energy by the end of 2050 would require building four 1-gigawatt nuclear power plants every day starting in January 2022. In the last thirty years, on average, 4 gigawatts of nuclear capacity have been created only every 540 days.

So if you've been glibly saying: let's just build nukes to phase out fossil fuel usage… yeah, see that Truman quote one more time.

Briefly noted:

  • The Fraser Institute is posting a series of essays on governments' responses to Covid. Sample, from David Henderson: The Abject Failure of Central Planning During Covid.

    In the first half of the 20th century, two Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises and his most famous student, Friedrich Hayek, argued that central planning under socialism could not work. Their argument had to do with the inability of central planners to set prices in the absence of information about demands and supplies that only free markets could reveal.

    Although their argument was airtight, it is not the only sound argument against central planning. The case against central planning is also more general. Not only do central planners lack the information needed to set rational prices, but also they lack the information needed to decide which industries and markets should be shut down and which regulations should be imposed on various industries during a pandemic. Just as with central planning of the socialist variety, central planning to deal with COVID-19 caused many misallocations. All of these problems became apparent, to those who were paying attention, in the way that the vast majority of governments around the world have dealt with COVID-19 from about February 2020 until the present day. Just as we have learned that central planning of prices under socialism does not work, so we should realize that central planning of markets, jobs, industries, and human interactions during a pandemic does not work.

    In short, they were saying "Do this! Do that!" And… well, you know what happened.

  • Jeff Jacoby piles on the scorn for another great idea from the planners that was supposed to make us all safe: Real ID was a real mistake and Congress should scrap it at last.

    As a terrorist-catching tool, Real ID has always been useless: Driver’s licenses and identification cards are of no use in fingering terrorists who haven’t already been spotted as threats. But as a vehicle for expanding government intrusiveness and control, Real ID is ideal. “The day would not be far off,” wrote cybersecurity and surveillance expert Jim Harper, a former congressional committee counsel and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, “when a national ID is required for picking up prescriptions, purchasing guns and ammunition, paying by credit card, booking air travel, and reserving hotel stays, to name just a few types of transactions the federal government might regulate.” Again: That may be normal in some societies, but it cuts sharply against the grain in ours.

    It has been more than two decades since 9/11. The still-unenforced Real ID Act is almost 18 years old. Those who once believed that the law was needed to prevent air-travel terrorism by rigorously identifying fliers know better now. Real ID is plainly irrelevant to the nation’s security. Enacting the law was a mistake, and it’s time Congress repealed it.

    Yes, they said "Do this! Do that!" And nothing happened.

  • Jonah Goldberg reveals The Real Donald Trump! At last!

    Trump isn’t merely hungry for respect; he’s, as the kids say, “thirsty” for respect—respect for his strength, his “very stable genius,” his masculinity and, of course, his money. When Trump read a 2015 column of mine in the New York Post mocking his potential run, he turned to his aide Sam Nunberg and muttered, “Why don’t they respect me, Sam?”

    Of course, there are people who respect Trump, but most of them aren’t friends, they’re fans, the sorts of people who don’t get the joke of his trading cards. In 2016, he told a New Hampshire audience: “I have no friends, as far as I’m concerned. You know who my friends are? You’re my friends.”

    Fans are generally the last people to tell you hard truths. Worse for Trump: His definition of fans are people who think he can do no wrong.

  • Jesse Singal has a New Year thought: In 2023, Let’s Rediscover Wrongness.

    Few articles could better sum up the media and intellectual landscape of 2022 than this one published late last month in The Guardian: “Ancient Apocalypse is the most dangerous show on Netflix.” The subheadline: “A show with a truly preposterous theory is one of the streaming giant’s biggest hits – and it seems to exist solely for conspiracy theorists. Why has this been allowed?”

    The show is dangerous! How was it allowed?

    The article is by Guardian culture writer Stuart Heritage. “Ancient Apocalypse,” he explains, centers on the theory that “an advanced ice-age civilisation – responsible for teaching humanity concepts such as maths, architecture and agriculture – was wiped out in a giant flood brought about by multiple comet strikes about 12,000 years ago.”

    Singal is tired, as we all should be tired, of journalists yelling "danger", trying to grab our eyeballs by scaring us.

    Related, those relentless promos for ABC News telling us we needed to watch because there was "so much at stake".

    Shut up, ABC News.


Last Modified 2024-01-15 5:24 AM EDT

Beyond This Horizon

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I own the 50¢ Signet paperback edition of this novel, pictured. I was pretty sure I'd already read all of Heinlein's novels, but as I tackled this one, I was unsure I had ever read this one. I sure didn't remember anything about it. The Wikipedia page is full of praise: good reviews from P. Schuyler Miller, Anthony Boucher, and J. Francis McComas; in 2018, it nabbed a "Retro-Hugo" award for Best Novel.

And (yet) I disliked it intensely. A book I'm currently reading claims it was (essentially) co-written with Heinlein's then-wife, Leslyn. That would explain (what I perceived as) the book's narrative style as like nothing Heinlein wrote before, or since.

The book pictures a society where genetic engineering is common. Also duelling. Prosperity is widespread, thanks to wise central planners. There's an attempted revolution somewhere in the middle, capped off with a ray-gun shootout. Other topics include telepathy, and immortality of the soul via reincarnation.

But basically, there's just a lot of talking.

Fun fact: the aphorism "An armed society is a polite society" comes from this book. I'm a Second Amendment fan, and yet I'm skeptical of that claim. Maybe if we were all aremed with ray guns, like here, we'd be more polite.


Last Modified 2024-01-15 5:24 AM EDT