Morning Reads for Monday, May 6, 2019.

Were public utilities still a thing – the way they were from even before the REA (circa 1935) until the privatization craze – it would be possible for “big government” to mandate alternative energy and do so at scale, which would necessitate a massive R&D, design, implementation, construction and ongoing maintenance effort that would create tens of thousands (or more) jobs at first and hundreds to thousands of jobs continuously. It would also create tons of patents that could be used to create next generation products – everything from toys to medical devices and industrial machinery – and processes to keep our industries competitive. But since apparently that’s “socialism” now – as opposed to how R&D and industry actually worked with DOD, DOE, NASA etc. during the Cold War – this approach is passe. I know this because the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute and the Rush Limbaugh show tell me so. The fact that all of those receive research grants and advertising from oil companies have nothing to do with it. Entirely incidental.

By the way … I wonder why so much work is done in solar and wind. Whatever happened to biofuels, which going back to ethanol was the first major alternative fuel thing? Of course, growing fuels expressly for this purpose doesn’t make a lot of sense … it takes away too much land and especially potable water that could be used to nourish people. But what about from agricultural byproducts that were just going to be dumped at the landfill anyway? Since family farming is now a thing of the past and most agriculture is being done by large corporations, it should be relatively easy to force “big agra” to coordinate with UGA (and I guess Georgia Tech) to find some method of turning their agricultural waste into something that can power a turbine. Or even better … some chemical that can extract as much methane as possible out of that stuff and allow the rest to be compressed into pellets that could simply be burned at some steam plant. But again, mandates are “socialism” and if it is an idea that the big agra doesn’t come up with on its own and exploits for its own profit – never mind the public interest, or the well known fact that corporations aren’t really good at innovating things outside their own immediate sandbox especially when they are raking in huge profits, have no real competition and no incentive to innovate – then it is one step away from a Peronist revolution comrade.