| | | Steve Forbes gets it..
forbes.com
How To Get A Truly Green World
-Steve Forbes
The world is in sorry shape economically. It’s heresy to say it, but one exceedingly productive move that would make the global economy great again would be to take a chainsaw to the immensely wasteful spending on so-called renewables, primarily windmills and solar panels. This would free up money for productive investment to fuel desperately needed economic growth.
Such a big initiative is needed. The World Bank’s estimate for global growth in 2024 is only 2.4%, this after a pathetic 2.6% last year. And that 2.4% may prove too optimistic.
Post-Covid economies should be surging; instead, most are treading water or sinking. Developing countries are languishing. China says it will expand 5% in 2024, but no one believes Beijing’s numbers anymore, not with the huge unemployment among young people and a still-troubled property market, once a major engine of growth.
Germany, Japan and Britain are in recession or close to it.
President Joe Biden boasts that the U.S. has the best economy in the world, but our performance is substandard by historic standards and unhealthily buttressed by big government spending. Amazingly, given the strange way we calculate GDP, government spending directly boosts it: The more checks Uncle Sam sends out, the higher the GDP number. Washington will shovel out about $7 trillion this financial year, and Biden wants to spend even more next year. These annual outlays exceed the supposed temporary highs during the worst of the Covid crisis. In other words, our subpar performance rests on a destructive, antiproductive investment platform.
Countries are drowning in debt. Total debt worldwide is $300 trillion, almost three times the size of the global economy. Slashing spending on alternative energy sources would set loose enormous sums of money to get economies expanding again. This is particularly crucial for poorer nations facing politically toxic stagnation.
Renewables are supposed to save the planet by eliminating carbon dioxide emissions. But more and more evidence points to the fact that the massive amounts of minerals needed for such a switch and other environmentally damaging steps in the process end up, at best, a draw with fossil fuels. In other words, we’re wasting unimaginable amounts of money for nothing.
Consider this: In this century, we’ve spent almost $6 trillion on renewables, and the share of energy worldwide coming from fossil fuels has declined from 86% to only 84%. If all these resources had instead gone into producing new businesses, expanding existing ones, creating new life-enhancing technologies and ensuring safe water for everyone, imagine how much better off the world would be. Or ponder this: Incredibly, Europe’s carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 1979; those of the U.S. peaked in 2005.
There are two surefire clean sources of energy: natural gas and nuclear power. Yet the Biden Administration is throttling the output of natural gas, even though the U.S. is loaded with it. Simultaneously, regulators are stifling exciting advances in nuclear energy, most specifically small modular reactors (SMRs), which are much easier to construct and save considerable time and cost. SMRs can supply power to compact areas like towns, campuses, hospitals and data centers. But government regulations are smothering SMRs by adding immense and unnecessary expenses and delays.
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