[AlanE]

Originally Posted by roflwaffle

In terms of the specifics, renewables tend to create more jobs than FFs, although I imagine that like everything else there are exceptions.

Obama bet the bank on your false premise and he, and taxpayers, are now reaping the reward.

It really boils down a simple insight - how much energy can be output per quanta of input. Everything else, jobs created, tax generated, economic activity spurred on, ripples out from that basic function. Oil and Coal have more attractive EROEI baselines, they produce baseline power and they can be delivered to the marketplace more cost effectively than solar and wind, meaning that industries which require steady baseline power can go about their business and create products and jobs and so on.

For your false premise to become reality, solar, wind, tidal power, biofuel, you name it, have to surpass the performance of fossil fuels. When they do that then your dream becomes quantifiable reality and we can avoid the political and business boondoggles like Solyandra.

Don't get me wrong, there are viable reasons to like some of these renewable technologies but efficiency, job creation, cheap power are not those reasons. The primary attraction that can be defended is that most renewables can be operated in a decentralized fashion. It's hard to build your own coal mine and coal power plant to power your own house, or to dig your own own well and refine your own oil to burn in your home furnace, but it's quite feasible to set up your own mini-hydro plant, your own wind power plant, your own solar array and power your own home. That will appeal to a lot of people, probably quite a few on this board who are tinkerers extraordinaire but I think you'd be hard pressed to find people who are deploying such systems because they are more cost effective (ignoring gov't subsidies.)

Green Energy Tech being a net positive job creator is a boondoggle based on wishful thinking and this will always be so until the fundamental physics is resolved to make this energy more cost effective.

Similarly, a country doing something does not imply that what it's doing is in the best interest of it's citizens as a whole.

I'm not really sure what this is supposed to mean. It's sounding an awful lot like the Philosopher-King reasoning that underpins much of liberal orthodoxy - put the smart man in a position of power and that smart man will make better decisions for everyone than they can make for themselves.

What we have at present is a corrupted system, which more often than not, produces outcomes which align with the best interests of most of the people.

I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't consider politics in America to be done for the benefit of the common man. Wealthy donors, who make up a relatively small percentage of the population, have a much greater impact on politics than the average Joe does.

I don't disagree too much. Corruption and rent-seeking are real problems in American politics but they don't completely overshadow the invisible hand of the masses.

In China I don't think this is any different. Rolling out a bunch of coal power plants in China certainly has to be good for some group, for instance the wealthier members of society because they can expand manufacturing and make more money selling stuff to the world and to their own country to a lesser extent, but it can also be worse for the country as a whole due to a host of externalized costs.

Don't overlook all of the workers who benefit from increased living standards. There are reasons why Foxconn has hundreds of thousands of workers living in dormitories assembling iPhones and iPads - these soul crushing factory jobs are better than the alternatives of living in a village and being in an energy poor environment where the highlight of the day is stewing up some tree bark or something for dinner.

The issue for China is how to apportion the gains that come from energy rich industrialization, not whether that energy rich industrialization is creating wealth for China. China is better off by using dirty energy to create wealth than it is in trying to make due with intermittent power from windmill farms or some other renewable fad.