April 23, 2022

Student Loan Update: Free Government Money In Action

April 23, 2022/ Francis Menton

The federal student loan program has been back in the news lately. On April 6 the Biden Administration announced the extension of the “pause” on payments of principal or interest federal student loans through August 31.
Does anybody believe that when August 31 comes the “pause” will not be then extended yet again at least through Election Day in November? Supposedly this is a matter of Covid “emergency.” Is this particular branch of the Covid “emergency” ever likely to end?
Federally-guaranteed student loans seemed like such a good idea when the program got started. Many of the best and brightest would benefit from college, but could not afford the cost. With federal support via guaranteed student loans, the young people could maximize their potential, and society would benefit at the same time from their increased productivity. The cost to the taxpayers would be minimal because the borrowers would have to repay. What’s not to like?
And then it all turned into a gigantic honeypot to be used for vote buying.

April 20, 2022

The New York Times Does Energy Storage

April 20, 2022/ Francis Menton

If you’ve been reading this blog lately, you know that the mythical transition to an energy future of pure “green” wind and solar electricity faces a gigantic problem of how to provide energy storage of the right type and in sufficient quantity.
To make the electrical grid work, the wildly intermittent production of the wind and sun must somehow be turned into a smooth flow of electricity that matches customer demand minute by minute throughout the year. So far, that task has been fulfilled largely by natural gas back-up, which ramps up and down as the sun and wind ramp down and up.
But now governments in the U.S., Europe, Canada and elsewhere say they will move to “net zero” carbon emission electricity by some time in the 2030s. Natural gas emits CO2, so “net zero” means that the natural gas must go. The alternative is energy storage of some sort.
So how can this problem be addressed?
To get some insights into the progressive approach, we turn as always to the New York Times.

April 16, 2022

April 16, 2022/ Francis Menton

Cheerleaders for “socialism” as a governance model superior to our own messy republican constitutionalism have long looked to China as their guiding light.
In this post from March 2021 (“Is China About To Win In The Battle For The Future?”), I collected a round-up of quotes from left-wing true believers in China’s inevitable ascendency. Examples included Ian Bremmer in Time Magazine in November 2017 (“How China’s Economy Is Poised to Win the Future”), and Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post in October 2017 (“China is winning the future. Here’s how.”).
And most notably, there was the New York Times’s Tom Friedman’s unforgettable column way back in 2009 articulating the deep faith in the superiority of having a country run by a meritocratic elite free from the tiresome burdens of elections and accountability.
With the intervening year, we have seen multiple examples of China’s authoritarian decision-making proving unable to make reasonable trade-offs, and thus steering the country into massive policy blunders. Here are a couple of current examples:

April 13, 2022

April 13, 2022/ Francis Menton

As reported in my last post, even the U.S. government’s own Energy Information Administration in the Department of Energy doesn’t believe for a minute that any kind of rapid transition to “net zero” carbon emissions is about to occur in this country.
Although President Biden has supposedly committed the entire federal bureaucracy to the “net zero” by 2050 transition, the EIA projects steady and even increasing fossil fuel usage in the U.S. through the entire 28 intervening years.
But surely there must be somebody taking this green energy transition thing seriously. The obvious place to look for such serious commitment would be in New York State, and most particularly New York City.

April 10, 2022

April 10, 2022/ Francis Menton

What will the production and consumption of energy look like in the United States in 2050? There are two very different answers to that question.
On Side One are those who assert that we face a “climate crisis” that can only be addressed by the rapid forced suppression of the production and use of fossil fuels. Therefore, some combination of government coercion, investor pressure and voluntary institutional action will shortly drive coal, oil and natural gas from the energy marketplace, to be replaced by carbon-free “renewables.” And thus by 2050 we will have achieved the utopia of “net zero” carbon emissions.
Those on Side Two think that the Side One vision is completely unrealistic fantasy. Simple arithmetic shows that without massive energy storage no amount of building of wind and solar generators can make much difference in fossil fuel use for electricity production; and adequate energy storage devices to fill the gap do not even exist as a technical matter, let alone at remotely reasonable cost. Result: no matter what the grandees say, fossil fuel production and use in 2050 will be as high or higher than they are now.
Which Side do you think is right?

April 07, 2022

April 07, 2022/ Francis Menton

As you likely know, on April 22, 2021 the “United States” “set a goal” of reaching “100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035.”
You know that because on that date (Earth Day!) President Biden issued a press release so announcing, although the document does not inform us how Biden was able to commit the “United States” to such an ambitious goal by the device of a mere press release, without any sort of affirmative action from the Congress, let alone any consultation with you. . . .
But clearly the people committing us to these goals have to know that a fully wind/solar and fossil-fuel-free electricity future requires lots of energy storage. After all, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that wind and solar produce nothing on a calm night. And indeed, if we look around at what our government is up to, we find considerable activity on the energy storage front.
But there is an almost complete disconnect between, on the one hand, current efforts of small research grants and pilot programs to investigate which of various new technologies might work, and, on the other hand, a multi-hundred-trillion dollar total transformation of the entire energy economy that will supposedly be accomplished within the next 13 years using technology not yet invented let alone demonstrated at scale.