Say Anything Blog

David Harsanyi:

For many years, those who spread apocalyptic global-warming scenarios have warned me that a collective national sacrifice was needed to save the world.

One option, we were told, was to make gas artificially expensive, forcing our ignorant, energy-gobbling neighbors to alter their destructive habits.

Well, here we are. At $4 a gallon for gas, we already have a flailing economy. Isn’t it glorious? And isn’t it exactly what many environmentalists desired?

The problem is that there is no feasible “alternative” fuel that can haul food from farms to cities, produce affordable electricity for your plasma TV and drive your kids to school. Not yet. It can happen, of course, but only (to pinch a word from enlightened grocery shoppers) organically.

The problem is that when “green” fantasies crash onto the shores of economic reality (as they did with corn-based ethanol), we all suffer.

Read the whole thing.

The basic problem with the political approach to the energy problem is that everyone seems to be looking for a “silver bullet” fuel alternative that is going to totally replace petroleum.  That’s why politicians spend billions of our tax dollars subsidizing these “green energy” ventures.

The problem is that there probably isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all, “silver bullet” solution.  What will probably happen is we’ll develop new energy alternatives for specific applications.  Maybe local delivery vehicles will go to electric cars.  Maybe private vehicle owners will go to battery/hydrogen hybrids.  Maybe these other applications will use so much less fuel that long haul trucks will be satisfied to keep trucking on diesel.

Who knows?  The thing is that we can’t force anyone one fuel down the neck of consumers.  For one thing, we’re a free society and we don’t take kindly to being forced to do things.  We’d much rather choose things.

For another, no politician on the face of the earth is smart enough to know where this energy thing is going to end up.  So it’s best to let the free choices of billions of free people globally dictate where it will go.  After all, billions of heads are better than hundreds of heads.

I envision that one day we pull up to fuel stations and instead of being presented with a choice merely between gasoline and diesel we’ll be presented with a menu of choices from things like hydrogen to outlets for electric cars to traditional, petroleum-based gas and diesel.

That would be the best way for us to go because it would be the market-driven solution.  And all we have to do to achieve it is just get the government to stop meddling in the energy market so that the natural progression of that market can run its course.