Wishful (green) thinking

A couple of weeks ago, family business required me, quite against my will and better judgement, to drive over the Cascades to the Eastern Washington town of Moses Lake.  This is a distance equivalent to driving from London to Exeter, though most of it is about as scenic as going through a quarry in a drought.  Thanks to this drought (called "summer" there) the eastern foothills of Stevens Pass, through which we'd driven, were in the vicinity of a raging forest fire that had left the lower pass so choked with smoke that we had no desire to face twice without respirators, so we took a detour to the Snoqualmie Pass to the south.  It's only like deciding to drive back from Dorset to London by way of Birmingham, so what's the difference?

The drive, though monotonous, was at least free of unpleasant events until we crested the hills leading down to the mighty Columbia river.  And there I saw them on the skyline; mile after mile of giant wind turbines costing God knows how many millions of dollars sitting idle in the breeze.  The few that were turning looked like the second hand on an electric clock filmed in slow motion and produced about as much power.

This might as well be an animated GIF for all these move.

This is one of those moments when "gob-smacked" is the only appropriate phrase.  I knew that Washington State was a debted-up, sorry, paid up member of the Left Coast fraternity, but I didn't think that they'd stooped to this level of battiness.  Washington State is blessed with ranges of mountains and powerful rivers that allow it to produce tremendous amounts of lovely electricity via hydroelectric dams–so much power the that state makes a nice profit shipping the surplus south.  It also manges this so cheaply that the local coal mines shut down thirty years ago as uncompetitive.  This is a state that has got it the proverbial made.  And what does it do?  It squanders scarce manpower and money constructing phalanxes of pointless bat-mashers and eagle-slicers that don't even work as advertised and wouldn't be practical even if they did.

To me, wind turbines are the modern equivalent of the Easter Island statues; pointless extravagances that mar the landscape and eat up vital capital that would be better spent on other things.  On a comparative scale of usefulness, blowing the wad on hookers and booze would do more good.  The amazing thing is that governments still borrow hundreds of billions of dollars, pounds, euros and giant yap stone coins to raise these totem poles to Blessed Gaia.  It's the same for most of the modern green agenda.  Having won a remarkable victory in the middle 20th century to convince people to clean up the air and water and stop using giant pandas as skeet shooting pigeons, the movement found itself running smack into the law of diminishing returns.  Worse, it found itself obsolete, marginal and increasingly dominated by Marxists who needed somewhere to go after Communism handed in its cards.  So, it leaped at the unproven hypothesis of global warming, declared it the equivalent of divine revelation and told the proles that they'd better learn to live in the 13th century again if they wanted to survive.  Naturally, the perceived problem and prescribed solution were presented as one and any attempt at doubting the truth of the problem or the practicality of the solution was treated with denunciations of heresy that would have brought a tear to Torquemada's eye.  Certainly Stalin would have appreciated it.

I'd be more willing to give the Environmentalists the benefit of the doubt if their agenda didn't keep banging into reality like a Morris Marina being hit with a piano.  They go about claiming that their ways will create all sorts of "green" jobs, but don't even blink when they're told that those jobs are very few, destroy many more than they create and cost a fortune in borrowed government money.  With a record like that, no wonder Mr Delingpole illustrates his article on the topic with a painting of a unicorn frolicking in a glen.

Then there's the race between Britain and Germany to see who can instigate rolling blackouts first before becoming an energy vassal of nuclear-powered France.  Not that the Americans have anything to be smug about with their shovelling money into solar panel makers who promptly go bankrupt.

And let's not forget electric cars.  As governments mandate and subside these over-sized golf carts on to the roads, it's becoming more and more obvious that the whole scheme is founded upon baseless hopes that somehow electric car technology will leap forward microchip fashion, a wilful blindness to the economics, and the inability to see that these cars are about as "green" as a lead-smelting plant run on charcoal made from California redwoods.

The coolie hat on the rider says volumes about what the Greens think of us.

Never mind.  If that doesn't work out we can always ban all motor vehicles or fall back on "green" bicycles complete with wooden frames sure to split after a week.  It makes about as much sense.

If the West's, for want of a better word, "leaders" insist on taking this attitude toward power in particular and technology in general, then I'd like to talk to them about giving a couple of billion dollars to subsidise my perpetual motion power plants.  They'll be as useful as any wind mill and I guarantee that they'll be 100 percent green.

Just contact me via my Cayman Islands bank.