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Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Where the world WILL get its energy in the coming decades...

Hint: it won't be all warm and fuzzy renewables. Coal and nuclear are the means of choice, and necessity, for developing nations producing electricity. All the enlightened folks in America and Europe palavering about wind farms and solar cells don't matter one bit to the billions in Asia and Africa that need electricity NOW, and as cheaply as possible. Peter Huber offers an excellent commentary in Forbes on the subject, with such trenchant observations as:
If the growth sphere doesn't get energy financing from our side, it will get it from Russia, China, South Korea, Brazil, the Middle East and Japan. It will get fuel-burning technology from Russia, South Korea, China and France. And it will get coal and uranium from Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia. Australia has huge reserves of both; China, India, Japan and South Korea are all vying to be its best friend. The U.S. has plentiful supplies of both, too--but not nearly enough to exert any control over global markets. Western Europe and Japan hardly show up on the charts.
We had better get behind the idea that carbon is going to be emitted, and in large quantities, for quite some time. We can either obstruct and protest against it, as Democrats in Washington and Greens in the EU are doing, or we can get active in the market and make sure pollution controls are part of the solutions that we are selling. Because if we don't get active, China and Russia will be building the world's power plants, and you can bet they won't pass any emissions controls anywhere. And there won't be one thing we can do about it. The same goes for drilling for oil. We refuse to drill here, where we have strict environmental controls and high standards, while buying tons of it from Venezuela and Nigeria, where they pollute and spill like crazy and there are no standards. And then their crazy rulers make even more money from our refusal to develop our own energy sources because our policies restrict the supply, all while trashing the environment that our policies are supposedly protecting. And the same holds true for coal. We don't hold all the reserves (and Europe has next to none), and it will be mined and burned whether or not we are in the game. Hopefully some of these politicians will realize this reality at some point. Read the whole thing, and then send it to your representatives in Washington. Via Instapundit.

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