Toltec wrote:
It is a three page piece so I have not quoted it all, the rest expands on the first paragraph above and I found it interesting as the points he raises make a lot of sense irrespective of the climate change debate.
Thanks for that, T. It is a very well considered and non polemic commentary. As a "we-gotta-do-something" type myself I am completely in agreement that we are doing the wrong thing by subsidising windmills and solar power. The future of "low carbon" energy has to nuclear - fission in the short term, fusion in the long term.
Where I disagree with him is in his statement that the free market always promotes innovation better than does a command economy. The years that gave us the most innovative and rapid technological advance - the beginnings of nuclear power, rocketry, computing; the birth of the jet engine; great advances in electronics - were the years of World War 2. During that period the economies of all the western powers, allied and axis, were absolute command economies.
Under the command of the US military nuclear fusion went from a theoretical idea to working reactors with all the associated infra structure in five years. The free market has been tinkering with nuclear fusion for sixty years without making any serious progress. Under a similar military command structure NASA went from some small, not very reliable rockets, to putting men on the Moon in a decade. In the next four decades the free market has managed to produce some pretty little rockets with not 5% of the lift capacity of the Saturn V.
If society wants something badly enough, be it national survival or a man on the moon, then a strict command economy is the only way to achieve it. Left to itself the free market merely produces more elaborate and attractive ways of spoiling society.
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