Why Wind and Solar Energy Are Doomed to Failure

April 24, 2021 by John Hinderaker in Energy Policy

Wind and solar energy are both essentially obsolete technologies. There is a reason why only the very rich or the very adventurous sail across oceans: the wind is unreliable, and at best produces relatively little energy. Nevertheless, liberals have concocted fantasies whereby all of our electricity, or perhaps our entire economy, will be powered by those fickle sources.

There are a number of reasons why this will never happen, but a paper published last week by Center of the American Experiment argues that land use constraints are the most basic reason why wind and solar are inexorably destined to fail. The paper, titled Not In Our Backyard, is authored by internationally recognized energy expert Robert Bryce, producer of the terrific documentary Juice: How Electricity Explains The World and the book A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations

Robert’s paper acknowledges that there are multiple reasons why wind and solar energy will never meet America’s energy needs, but focuses on the particular problem of land use:

Of course, other factors, including the incurable intermittency of renewables as well as the massive amounts of materials, including steel, concrete, copper, and rare earth elements, will limit the deployment of wind and solar. But the biggest barrier is the land-use problem. The ferocity and extent of rural land-use conflicts are showing that any attempt to convert the domestic economy to run solely on renewables is destined to fail.

Why is land use such a problem for wind and solar, but not for coal, nuclear or natural gas? Because wind and solar are pathetically low-intensity energy sources, as reflected in this chart from Bryce’s paper:............To Read More....

Biden and Xi Think the Constitution Is Racist

April 17, 2021 by John Hinderaker in Joe Biden, Leftism 

Yesterday an intrepid reporter asked the insufferable Jen Psaki about U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s assertion that America’s founding documents are white supremacist. 

Doesn’t that echo Chinese Communist propaganda, as in the recent diplomatic debacle in Anchorage? 

Does Joe Biden intend to fire Thomas-Greenfield? And, the most salient question: does Biden share her contempt for America’s founding documents, i.e., the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence? It takes some doing, but the answer to that last question is Yes:........

• The dominant elements of our political class hate our country. 
• And our schools are run by people who hate our country–the public schools, and even more so, the “elite” private ones. 
• Also, it seems, most of our major corporations, which are, after all, global. 

Has any country ever survived such an onslaught from within? I doubt it............To Read More...

 

Death Rates Plummeting

Posted on March 24, 2021 by John Hinderaker in Coronavirus

In my opinion, the covid lockdowns in Europe, the U.S. and some other countries have been one of the worst public health fiascos in recent history. I don’t know whether the true story will ever be written, but we have devastated the lives of our young people and destroyed countless businesses–in other words, people’s lives–in a vain attempt to reduce the death rate among the elderly and frail. The Wuhan bug is a disease, and as such a bad thing. But its fatality is concentrated, to an even greater extent than a typical seasonal flu, among those who are not only elderly but are already sick.

This implies that a large majority of those who died from covid in 2020 or 2021 in all likelihood would have died relatively soon in any event–later in 2020 or 2021, or in 2022, and so on. In the U.S. and Europe, overall death rates have in fact been elevated over the past year. But if this hypothesis is correct, we should see lower than normal death rates over the next couple of years. If that happens, it will put the Wuhan epidemic in quite a different light.

The U.K. is ahead of the U.S. on the covid time line, and now, for the first time, total death rates there are falling below the historic average:............To Reads More.....

 

A Tsunami of Hate

Posted on January 31, 2021 by John Hinderaker in Democrats, Leftism, Liberals

Our friend David Horowitz makes the case that our present political crisis is not the result of polarized views on policy, but rather is caused by the Left’s outpouring of vicious hate and determination to crush all opposition.

Everybody agrees that our country is in crisis – and agrees that it is the worst crisis since the Civil War. But at the same time, we tell ourselves a comforting tale about the source of the crisis that perpetuates the problem instead of providing a path to ending it. We say our politics are “divisive” and talk about “unity and healing” as though that would miraculously be achieved if everybody stopped … what? Disagreeing? All politics is divisive. That’s the healthy basis of our constitutional order: the freedom to disagree. To suppress disagreement, to outlaw it – as many Democrats and their Big Tech and media allies – are demanding these days, is to end democracy as we know it.

The problem is not that we disagree. We are not suffering as a nation from healthy disagreement. We are suffering from a Tsunami of Hate emanating from the Democrat Party that seeks to demonize, criminalize and extinguish dissent from the 75 million supporters of Donald Trump. It is now official Washington dogma that to question an election result – something the congressional Democrats have done in the face of every Republican presidential victory since 2000 – is now “insurrection” and “domestic terrorism,” or the incitement thereto, and needs to be prosecuted and suppressed...........To Read More....