It’s now standard knowledge that the Bureau of Land Management desert offices are bending over trying to jump through their bungholes permitting all of the proposals for converting the desert to industrial solar energy production. And their masters in Washington are cracking whips yelling, “faster, more, harder.” The conventional so-called wisdom is that the climate is changing, oil is more expensive, and we have to transition to renewable energy. Solar must be part of the mix. There are even suggestions afoot to establish national steering committees so that we can destroy the desert in a careful, thoughtful, conscientious manner.
In these pages I offer a different view of the future. In five to ten years we are more likely to experience rolling blackouts on the grid and the fifth to tenth year of a serious depression than we are to have a happily motoring boom running on mirrors in the desert. In five to ten years, if we’re still alive, we’ll see. Of course the conventional wisdom by then will have taken up some new fiction and forgotten the last fiction. What was it? Ethanol? Hydrogen cars? Or if you want to go back to the fifties, nuclear power “too cheap to meter.”
Solar power at the scale proposed has no self emergent or self organizing properties. To explain what I mean, let me give an example. The oil bidness kicked off in 1859 with a few test wells and a shortage of whales. In a relatively big hurry Rockefeller got filthy rich and had to be busted up by the government. Now the whole world runs on oil and tankers big enough to hold all of the Anasazi civilization along with some of the Incas carry it across the oceans. This wasn’t a government-planned enterprise. Even hydro power is self-emergent at the right scale. At one time nearly every stream in the eastern U.S. was dammed to grind grain. It was only when the government got involved in dam building that the Bureau of Reclamation created Lake Powell and Lake Mead. But this was the upscaling of a self emergent phenomenon. Solar is nothing new. It’s been around longer than dirt and what do we have besides sun ovens, panels, and a few highly subsidized experiments? If solar had any other emergent properties they would have emerged by now.
This current land rush to solar is based on a law that says power companies need to provide 20% renewables, a law that says solar development gets a tax break, and yet another law that limits and trades carbon dioxide certificates. We can all believe that the Soviet Union collapsed because it’s economy was centrally planned. Apparently we can also believe that we’ll get out of our present fix by passing laws. This isn’t central planning by committee. This is central planning by special interests who like bilking society for their own benefit and people who only vote for free pie and ice cream. Without those laws, what do you have? Oil, coal, gas, and hydroelectric. Uncle Sammy can bailout the banks, bailout the car makers, bailout the economy, and make electricity with mirrors in the desert only as long as the Chinese let him. Now that gig is coming to an end.
Five to ten years from now we’ll be in the fifth to tenth year of an increasingly severe economic depression, all the damage that will have been done in the present mad rush will be just that much more junk out in the blowing sand, and we’ll be growing accustomed to electrical brownouts. Áve María, grátia pléna, Dóminus técum. Benedícta tu in muliéribus, et benedíctus frúctus véntris túi, Iésus. |
