Thursday, October 13, 2011

Socialism With a Smiley Face...

Green Energy is all about Wasting Energy…and Cash.
There’s a variety of reasons why these Green Energy companies get their funding from the federal government:
1. No self-respecting venture capitalist or wise investor puts his cash into technologies that don’t work, aren’t profitable, and are the result of a badly-understood, and mostly-made-up ‘scientific theory’ that even the scientists can’t agree on, itself the product of bad science and political douchebaggery. If the bulk of Green Energy startups had to depend on the Free Market to attract investment, there’d be no Green Energy startups. They’d be laughed out of the boardroom before they even finished their sales pitch.

2. The American Political system has been perverted to operate on a model of issue-advocacy and symbiotic relationship between Big Business and government, rather than on the founding principles of responsible government that serves the Public Trust. All issues have constituencies, but some constituencies become more important than others when they can contribute campaign cash or round up voting blocs for a particular politician or political party. To keep access to that cash and those voting blocs, individual politicians, and entire parties make certain that these donors and organizers are kept happy with large dollops of taxpayer money or special privileges, as often and as quietly as possible.

3. The ultimate purpose of the Green Energy industry is not, as one might assume, to produce energy, but rather to suck cash out of taxpayer pockets under the guises of 'good public policy' and technical and industrial advancement which will provide jobs for citizens. Many of these companies, however, are started specifically to get at the federal subsidies. They may build a factory, or a small wind farm, and maybe even a showcase solar farm, but the actual expenditure and project scale are rather small and cheap; the bulk of that subsidy goes into someone’s pocket, and as soon as the government cash dries up the company goes out of business. Instead of ‘Too Big to Fail’ we get ‘Intended to Fail, but only after I’ve gotten stupid rich on taxpayer money, and Senator Dingleberry's re-election is assured’.

4. The whole Green Energy scam is part of a wider political scheme. Green Energy policy is but a tool with which World Socialism is stealthily introduced at the expense (literally) of Capitalism. Green Energy is a boondoggle in which advanced, industrialized nations actually conspire to arrest their own development with a system of laws, regulations, taxes, carbon emissions standards, and so forth, but then exempt ‘emerging’ economies like China, India and Indonesia, so that they may ‘catch up’ to the Western economies. That this involves the use of technologies and fuels which the West has deemed ‘dangerous’, and this sets up a double-standard is irrelevant; the point is to artificially stop Western economic growth to such an extent that there is virtually no difference (in say, 25 years) between the American and Chinese economy or living standards.

Everyone will be made equal, one side by continuing to pollute to its heart’s content, and the other by committing economic suicide. There you go: everyone’s finally equal, and since the West will have destroyed its economic and technical base in the process and will be hard-pressed to recover, everyone will stay equal for a very long time to come. Socialist World Revolution without the need for messy wars, and the West will have done it under the false impression that they have followed some great moral imperative.

But, companies like Solyndra and Sun Power serve an even more insidious purpose, in the longer run.

By wasting such huge amounts of capital, materials, and labor for no purpose beyond ensuring they can't be accumulated by anyone (this is how people get rich, you see?) and operating on a flawed economic model (ex: Solyndra produced solar panels at $6 each, and then sold them for $3!), they effectively manage to eliminate ‘excess’ wealth that otherwise would have  raised people’s standards of living and thus created greater disparity in wealth between people, but only in a way that appears beneficial that the government openly seizing someone's home or checking account by force, wouldn't.

You could have achieved much the same results by building one million homes and then setting fire to them, or by baking fifty million loaves of bread and then dumping them into the local landfill. The point is to relieve an economy of what Socialists consider ‘excess’ wealth which will become a point of contention between social classes, and thus, bring violence, discord, and instability. That much of that ‘excess’ wealth still finds it’s way into someone’s pocket is, again, irrelevant; those who are of the Nomenklatura are always allowed a few excesses, as befits their station, connections, and dedication or importance to the cause.

Occasionally, you do get an honest-to-God Capitalist or two turning up in these things, but these guys weren’t in it to make the company a going concern: they were just the people who knew which backs to scratch and which campaigns to contribute to in order to secure the ‘loans’ and subsidies; the really dangerous people in this conspiracy of stupidity are the government  apparatchiks, bureaucrats and politicians who run the scheme. The capitalist is simply motivated by greed, whereas the government douchebag has a deeper, hidden, sinister political and ideological agenda. 

The two always meet at the intersection of Greed and Devious. That it isn’t illegal is not shocking, either, as both have vested interests in keeping it that way. They call it a Public-Private Partnership, but it’s more like a Public-Private Rape Gang.

That it all has the appearance of Capitalism (factories are built, people get (ultimately temporary) jobs, the companies might be publicly traded, and so forth) is just the beauty of the whole scam. Lenin once said that Capitalism would sell the Commies the rope with which they would ultimately hang us, and he was right. Only nowadays, we term this insidious circumstance a ‘government investment’. And it doesn’t only happen in the Green Energy industry; the same is true of the Educational Establishment, for example, producing worthless products (a Bachelor’s degree in Gender Studies or Hip Hop, for example), at great, usually public, expense, that serve no useful economic purpose and improve very few lives.

That some of these companies will fail spectacularly is not all that surprising, seeing as how that’s what they were intended to do, but that the American taxpayer has been suckered to such an extent by its own leadership. Considering the absolutely crappy people we send to Washington, D.C., and the authority we give them, this is perhaps our just desserts.

2 comments:

Robert Janicki said...

Unless there is a quantum leap in materials engineering, solar panels will never be economically viable. Silicon panels have an efficiency factor or 7%-8% and the newest 'thin film' panels have an efficiency of about 17%.

In order for solar energy generation to be economically viable, solar panels must have, at the very least, an efficiency factor in the 30% to 40% range.

Even then there is not enough real estate available to mount panels to produce energy generation equal to any one of the three fossil fuels used in electrical generation.

R&D funds need to go into materials engineering research for the next generation of solar panels.

Solyndra was using silicon panels which are actually old technology wrapped in a nice package. When the price of silicon dropped the Chinese beat them on their lower wage rate and government subsidies.

Sun Power will be the next to fall and it will make Solyndra look like kid's lemonade stand. Sun Power currently has debt exceeding its capitalization. Technically Sun Power is bankrupt. Sun Power is into U. S. Taxpayers for around $1.5 billion dollars, which is about three times greater than the Solyndra debacle.

Matthew Noto said...

Pardcon me for not responding sooner. Been moving and getting settled in.

Green Energy is a tremendous boondoggle with political implications. As such, it will continue to suck up taxpayer cash as stupid democrats (sorry, that's redundant) and brain-damaged republicans are never made aware that, in the end, it's simply not possible to produce something out of nothing.

Which is what the promise of Green Energy is, on it's face; we can do something 'for free', or produce power from a 'renewable source' which doesn't involve...you know...FUEL. What it really is, deep down, is part of a concerted effort to kill Western Economies with their own red tape.

The Watermelons (Green on the outside, Red on the inside) know this. Your typical American, with an attention span measured in RPM's, and the dogsqueeze they continue to elect to positions of authority don't know this.

The Watermelons depend on this ignorance, and so does your typical Congresscritter.

We ought to start administering IQ tests to potential voters and shooting those who can't score higher than room-temeprature, and turning some of this fantastic surveilance technology we now have on our elected officials.

Sunlight might not generate a great deal of electricity, nowadays, but it does wonders in exposing this sort of crap.