Environment & Energy

... but turned out not to be in actual practice.

I was very familiar with all the "alternative energy" technologies of the 'seventies. Most of them did not turn out well. Nevertheless, they seem to return in cycles only to fail again and again, sometimes at larger scales.

For some of these the ideas were untenable from the start. I put "the hydrogen economy" in this category. The numbers just don't work and they never did.

Now that we've built gigawatt scale solar/wind/battery power systems and have the actual numbers it's pretty clear those won't displace fossil fuels to any significant extent.

Support for these energy technologies is just another way of denying global warming, a way of endlessly putting off until tomorrow what needs to be done today.

The worst example of this is fusion energy. How long will it take for that to work? It seems likely to me it will never be a viable source of energy, not in this universe.

Government support of fuel ethanol is just an ugly subsidy to a filthy industry.