



Because wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, “renewable” energy requires many more transmission lines, and bigger batteries.

Unfortunately, Meigs says: “You have to mine materials for batteries. Those mines are environmentally hazardous. Disposing of batteries is hazardous.”



Still, wind turbines and solar batteries are 10 times more efficient than when they were first introduced! That’s not good enough, writes Mills, to make “the new energy economy” anything more than “magical thinking.”


The dream of “green” causes us to misdirect resources. Even after billions in government subsidies, solar still makes up less than 1 percent of America’s energy — wind just 2 percent. And even that energy isn’t really “clean.”

“We use billions of tons of hydrocarbons to make the windmills that are already in the world, and we’ve only just begun to make them at the level people claim they would like them to be built,” Mills says. “Pursue a path of wind, solar and batteries, we increase how much we dig up and move by a thousand-fold.”

“You gotta clear-cut the forest. These machines kill a lot of birds,” Meigs says. “I agree that we should bring down our carbon emissions ... but we should also make sure we’re spending money on stuff that really works.”

There is one energy source, however, that efficiently produces lots of power with no carbon emissions: nuclear.

But people fear it. They point to the Chernobyl plant accident in Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan.

“The Chernobyl plant design was idiotically bad,” Meigs says. They don’t make nuclear plants like that anymore.

What about Fukushima?


I pointed out that people were killed during the evacuation.

“Fear of radiation killed people,” Meigs responded. They evacuated older people who didn’t need to go.

People fear what they don’t understand and what they can’t see.

“A dam breaks, and hundreds of thousands of people die. Nuclear plants, their safety, ironically, is actually evident in their accidents!” Mills says.


Yet after Fukushima, Germany shut down its nuclear plants. That led to higher electricity prices and increased carbon emissions because Germany burned coal to make up for the loss of nuclear power.

Likewise, “in Bernie Sanders’ home state of Vermont, they shut down their nuclear plant. Guess what happened? Carbon emissions went up,” Meigs recounts. “This supposedly green state, ultra-liberal Vermont, went backwards.”

If a Green New Deal is ever implemented, says Mills, it would rob the poor by raising energy costs, while “giving money to wealthy people in the form of subsidies to buy $100,000 cars, to put expensive solar arrays on their roofs or to be investors in wind farms.”




Contact columnist and television commentator John Stossel through creators.com.