Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

There is a rather excellent piece at the Powerline Blog about the reasons why Green energy is doomed to fail. The bottom line in his piece is land use and the infrastructure to bring the energy from where it is generated to the NIMBY folk who want the energy but not the infrastructure is dramatic to say the least.

When “green” advocates tabulate the costs of wind and solar energy, they generally don’t include the thousands of miles of transmission lines that are required to bring electricity from the rural areas that are stuck with “green” development to the urban areas where the electricity is used. But such transmission lines represent a huge economic and environmental issue:

Connecting lots of wind and solar to the grid also requires appropriating land for transmission projects. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, converting the domestic electric grid to run on renewables will require roughly doubling the amount of high-voltage transmission capacity in the U.S. At present, the U.S. has about 240,000 miles of high-voltage transmission. Therefore, renewables conversion means adding enough high-voltage transmission lines to circle the Earth about 10 times.

The piece and the report it cites is excellent however there is one glaring error that I would like to point out and it’s an error in terms of premise.

The premise of the piece is that green energy is “doomed to failure” however that is incorrect. Not because it won’t provide the energy needs it claims, it won’t but because the goal of green energy is not to provide energy but to provide cash, from the piece:

So why does the “green dream” persist? In part, because it is inflicted on children from elementary school on. But mostly because there is a great deal of money in it. This chart shows the volume of U.S. tax incentives per unit of energy produced for various energy sources:

“Green” energy holds political sway, which has made a relative handful of people (largely non-Americans and lobbyists) immensely wealthy, while impoverishing utility rate payers and taxpayers–that is to say, the rest of us. 

“Green” energy is all about the green that is all about the green that lobbyists can get from US taxpayers for their clients and the political kickbacks in terms of both contributions and jobs for the connected and their families in these industries all paid for by you.

If you remember that this is the actual goal, to grease the connected at the taxpayer expense rather than produce clean power for the public then Green energy not only hasn’t failed but it has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.

Virginia Department of Education this week announced the “Virginia Mathematics Pathways Initiative” (VMPI), a plan to reorient Virginia’s mathematics curriculum that will rid their public schools of all advanced math classes for students prior to the 11th grade. No longer will those students who excel be given the opportunity to challenge themselves until they are almost in college. As the VMPI’s “Essential Concepts” Committee member Ian Shenk admits in their webinar, the new program means removing algebra, geometry, and algebra II from the curriculum for anyone before their junior year in high school.

Advanced math students typically take algebra by 8th grade, and in the webinar the committee even noted students that were taking geometry in 8th grade.

The new program means those kids would be denied those challenges for three years, in which they will be forced to wallow in “learning” concepts they had likely mastered years before.

Why would the Department of Education purposefully hobble the education of its students?

“Equity.” The VMPI even spells it on in PowerPoint: the project’s number one goal is “improving equity in mathematics learning opportunities.”

It’s the Left’s obsession, and like every Leftist obsession, it’s destructive to anything it touches.

Instead of letting advanced students advance, for Virginia’s educrats, “equity” means bringing everyone down to a lower level. It means limiting the opportunities for hard-working, excellent students.

That’s one way to decrease any racial, class, or sex discrepancies in academic excellence. If you don’t allow anyone to excel, everyone will be limited to mediocrity.

That’s generally been the Left’s way, anyway, so it should come as no surprise. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

It’s similar to how the Left speaks of billionaires. Bernie Sanders can bleat about how “billionaires should not exist.” He doesn’t explain why billionaires should not exist, of course.

Whatever else they are, billionaires are often people who excelled at business. But the real problem is that billionaires are powerful, and for the Left, all power must be held by the Left.

Billionaires might have visions that their billions allow them to accomplish, like eliminating malaria or becoming a multi-planet species. Sorry, Bernie, but we should have more billionaires, not fewer. Wouldn’t mind being one myself, truth be told (though to be fair, Bernie’s got a significant head start on me, if this is a race).

It’s better than he Left’s alternative vision: “equity” in mediocrity.