There is, However, Another Way of Looking at, or for, Socialism.

Hey all, it’s been ten days since my last post (but I’ve got more than 30 drafts, some of which I will discard, others may be outdated, yet a decent amount of which I hope to post in the near future). I’ve been somewhat busy with researching environmental organizations and “green” energy subsidies. I won’t bore you with any of the details (yet?), but I’d like to share some of my general observations.

The pattern I have seen develop for the different types of energy, as well as their advocates, is that,

If your goal is energy that does not emit carbon and does not have more negative social and economic impact than its worth, go with nuclear or hydroelectric;

If your goal is cheap energy, go with fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, oil and their many variants)

And if your goal is energy independence, go with domestic fossil fuels supplemented with “clean energy” where it truly is viable (like solar where the sun always shines, hydroelectric where the water always flows, wind where the wind always blows, nuclear, hybrid vehicles and even certain types of biomass and fuel cells);

But!

If your goal is to: destroy life as we know it, go back decades if not centuries, limit economic and population growth as well as the standard of living, enrich corporations and empower bureaucrats at the expense of taxpayers and citizens, all the while not producing very much energy at all and still emitting vast amounts of carbon in some cases; then by all means, “clean energy” (especially dismal failures like lithium-ion battery powered cars, hydrogen fuel, ethanol from corn, and the vast majority of solar and wind power) is the way to go!

Okay. That’s all I really had to share for now. But I will tell you, as I’ve told you before at the end of this piece, to look for my post on energy independence (first drafted November 30th) in the near future.

The title of this piece comes from one called After Communism, written for the September 10, 1990 issue of The New Yorker by Robert Heilbroner (“Mises was right.”), in which he described the failure of socialism to create equality and prosperity but went on to say how it might still be necessary to create a socialist society to save the environment from the ravages of the free market and economic growth.