Maggie's Farm

Cultural advancement and specialization has turned us into remarkably ignorant creatures, to the extent that we can no longer make sense of obvious things. For instance, we are exhorted to 'Trust the Science' and yet no scientists have proven that CO2 in the atmosphere is driving Global Warming, indeed, that there is any Global Warming at all - much less correlated with CO2 levels. There is still vigorous debate about these hypotheses, where debate is even allowed.

And yet we are being pushed straight past this glaring scientific omission and being corralled into acceptance of unsustainable energy choices. Unsustainable in the long term, and as we learned this winter across the northern hemisphere, pretty much unsustainable in the short term, too. Every country that has tried the experiment has come up woefully short.

It should be obvious that the distribution of energy is best accomplished from sources of high energy density, nuclear being at the top of that pyramid. Solar and Wind and other forms of distributed, low density energy collection are at the bottom; they will never succeed on scale. They require too much land, have too great an environmental impact, and require a collection network to concentrate the energy for distribution to consumers. It doesn't work. They are simply a parasite on the existing grid, dependent on tax credits while making free use of infrastructure that was built for conventional powergen.

Contrast the thousands of acres that are required for modest 'Green' energy generation, capacity that is implicitly crippled by intermittency, against the one-time construction activity for a buried pipeline supplying a clean gas-fired plant with near 100% design uptime. This demonstrates the cognitive impairment of the environmental evangelists; it's nothing less than willful ignorance.

The principle attraction of solar and wind generation is portability - they're great for your sailboat or your cabin, maybe even for backpacking. Their attraction lies in their portability and independence from infrastructure. At small scale, they offer great value. But at industrial scale, they are a blight on the landscape, and anything but 'green'.