Chasing Utopian Energy: How I Wasted 20
Years of My Life
Real Clear Energy,
by
Brian Gitt
Original Article
Posted By: Beardo,
7/1/2022 10:47:59 AM
I wasted 20 years of my life chasing utopian energy.
Utopian energy is an imagined form of energy that’s abundant, reliable, inexpensive, and also clean, renewable, and life-sustaining. But utopian energy is as much a fantasy as a utopian society. Seeking the fount of perfect energy allows us to pretend there aren’t real-world tradeoffs between, say, banning fossil fuels and helping people in impoverished nations or between using solar and wind power and conserving natural habitats. For years, I chased utopian energy. I promoted solar, wind, and energy efficiency because I felt like I was protecting the environment.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
MickTurn 7/1/2022 11:30:46 AM (No. 1203033)
You want Utopian Energy? Do some flatulence in the wind and light a match! There's your Heat!
5 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
NorthernDog 7/1/2022 11:43:04 AM (No. 1203065)
I remember driving by fields full of wind turbines and only about half of them are turning. Even if there is wind - sometimes they do not work.
7 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Avikingman 7/1/2022 11:43:45 AM (No. 1203067)
Thorium reactors seem promising, why not pursue that?
5 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
Snortleblatt 7/1/2022 12:01:41 PM (No. 1203105)
Nice to see eyes open. Honest information and debate on all sides is exactly what is needed. The goal of all else is self-serving tyranny (looking at YOU, Mr. Biden!)
7 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
jeffkinnh 7/1/2022 12:03:15 PM (No. 1203107)
Welcome to the party Brian. Meanwhile, those of us who got to the reality you are seeing 20 years ago have been demonized by your previous fellow Greenies. We have seen trillions wasted. We have tried to rationally explain why the Greens were wrong. We have pointed out failures similar to Brian's personal experience and have been spit in the face over it. We have seen real world solutions that could have made an enormous difference by now, ignored. We have noted that the "science" was nowhere near settled as the "scientists" lied about it and insisted it was, with the enthusiastic support of the politicians and media.
The Greens are not HONEST about the environment and as Brian did, feel it is a personal, moral fight. They let their personal involvement, tied to their self-worth, blind them to reality and possibilities. Schools encourage this wrong thinking and encourage unquestioning worshipping at the altar of Green.
I suspect Brian's conversion, despite his credentials is NOT going to be welcomed by his fellow Green travelers. Soon he will find himself despised and ignored. I wish him luck but I think he will be shocked at the enormous resistance to his new thinking.
10 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
rikkitikki 7/1/2022 12:33:35 PM (No. 1203144)
Easy, one-solution answers don't exist.
With nuclear power offering the most efficient source, however, geothermal seems most promising to me.
4 people like this.
Where is the part where he apologizes for being an idiot and gives back all the government money he took and wasted?
6 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
DVC 7/1/2022 12:38:49 PM (No. 1203152)
Every single person on Planet Earth should read this.
One of the best articles on the topic that I have seen.
I have much in common with this guy, but saw the light much sooner in my life.
I was always an outdoors person, camping, hiking and swimming were part of my childhood, and when I went to college I started to go to the big, beautiful mountains of Wyoming. My wife and I have rarely missed a year in Yellowstone and surrounding mountain ranges, but now that we have a home in the mountains of southern Colorado, and are getting older, we don't go to Wyoming quite as much.
In college inFlorida, I discovered a professor, a world renowned solar energy expert, doing lots of fundamental research on the topic and teaching. Along with my other mechanical engineering courses, I studied solar energy, and I learned what solar energy could do. Heat and air condition your home, for sure.
Solar panels were only affordable for spacecraft.
And during my college years, the Arabs cut off oil to increase their profits and the "energy experts" told us that oil was "running out" and we'd be out of oil and other "fossil fuels" in a few decades at most (in 1972).
We were a "peak oil" and it was guaranteed all downhill from there.
As a naive young man, I believed "the experts". I bought a copy of "Limits to Growth", a book by the Club of Rome (more experts) which "proved" with computer modeling that ALL our necessary metals and energy sources were running out rapidly and we just could NOT SUSTAIN the growth of the population and the comfortable lifestyle that we had known for a century or more.
A few years after I graduated college, my father was building a new home in the country, his retirement home where he and my mother would live for 35 years. Because fossil fuels were "running dry", I designed the roof angle to take solar panels, and the roof overhangs to shade the south facing windows in the summer and let in all the sun in the winter. He put in a large wood fired furnace which could take 4-5 foot long logs, and burn for a day or more without refueling, and heat the home with a central wood fired heating system, with the normal heating oil system also in line, so either could be used, since "oil was nearly gone", so said the expert. When they sold the home 35+ years later, no solar panels were ever needed, and he wood furnace had been used perhaps a half a dozen times. Money and effort wasted.
I was a member of the International Solar Energy Society, getting a monthly technical journal on the advancement in the science of solar energy. I studied all about windmills in my spare time. I subscribed to the Mother Earth News, and read it avidly.
After several years working in industry, I seriously considered a career change in about 1979 to work in the "alternative energy" industry, which I believed was The Future. But about then, it had been nearly a decade since the experts had told us we were about out of EVERYTHING, and the cost of gasoline had dropped back, supplies were plentiful, fuel oil and propane were cheaper than they had been, and I was a decade older and wiser. I was working in the chemical processing industry and saw the ways we were redesigning our chemical plants to use less energy, yet still put out the products that people needed from ant killers to Glad bags. I saw that all the warnings in "Limits to Growth" had fallen flat.
And I began doing computer modeling myself in the mid-late 70s, and I saw the EXTREME limits of that capability, and how the tiniest error or misinformation in one variable, or one coefficient (which were often literally impossible to measure, so had to be guessed at) would MASSIVELY change the outcomes of these computer models. I saw the massive limits of computer models, ripe for misuse.
I was growing up, I was seeing that they were full of beans. I was learning that they were quasi-religious zealots, driven by a vision, not driven by facts and truths, not by science. I saw the limitations of these alternate energy schemes. I looked at purchasing a piece of land in the Blue Ridge Mountains which had enough flowing water to make some power for a home. I learned about water mills, Pelton wheels, Francis turbines, et al. I saw that water power was good, but most of the best sites were already in use, and many smaller ones were being abandoned as uneconomic.
I studied nuclear power, and saw that, done wisely it was good. I was visiting a friend doing his post doc work at Johns Hopkins when the "horrific" (not) Three Mile Island "disaster" happened a short distance away.
I saw all the LIES and hysteria put out by the anti-nuclear media. No one died, no one was hurt, very little bits of radiation were leaked, no harm, yet huge hysteria. I watched "The China Syndrome" movie and saw that it was blatantly false anti-nuclear propaganda, too.
In the 90s, I built a cabin in the southern Colorado mountains, and mains power would cost $30,000 to reach the home, so I fell back on my solar engineering and designed, built and installed a small solar electricity system, since sunshine is abundant there. I have operated that small solar electric unit, expanding it twice over the last nearly 30 years, and have a lot of experience on the limitations and costs of solar power, first hand. It is fine for a remote cabin, uneconomic elsewhere. A waste of money.
I managed to avoid wasting 20 years of my life as the author did, but I started down that path. I just figured it out earlier than he did.
"Green energy" is a fraud. It's OK for simple things like powering a few lights and a TV in a remote cabin, but enough to power a refrigerator is impractically expensive, and a furnace blower or the well pump is beyond my modest system's capabilities. Could I add more panels and more batteries? Yes, at great cost, but a propane refrigerator and a wood stove are dramatically cheaper and work fine.
Solar, wind, etc are a mirage, an attractive illusion. Just like a mirage shows you water in the desert, these ecocrazies show you 'clean, cheap energy'.....and just like the mirage, it is a lie.
18 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
walcb 7/1/2022 1:35:46 PM (No. 1203223)
I suppose I am supposed to be grateful to the author that he is now wise with open eyes. Sorry, I consider him to be the useful idiot that he was for 20-30 years operating with a training in science but too stupid to see the fallacy until he made many millions of dollars off the government teat. I am with one of the above poster, until he takes his millions of dollars and does something meaningful with it he can continue to write and claim he is now a leader in changing the country from following his green idiot buddies and pursue an energy source that is reliable, economical, safe and above everything doesn't produce the terrible CO2. He will remain an idiot in my eyes because he will influence no one and will from now on become ridiculed by the wise greenies just like all of those who understood the fallacy on the outset and have been ridiculed from day one.
3 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
udanja99 7/1/2022 2:00:49 PM (No. 1203254)
We already had utopian energy - it was called “nuclear”.
I got a good education on solar energy in 2018 on a visit to Ayer’s Rock in Australia. It’s in the middle of the vast red desert that makes up a big chunk of the outback. The sky is cloudless about 320 days a year. There is a small resort area there with a couple of hotels, shops and restaurants and it is surrounded by great fields of solar panels. I asked how much of the resort’s energy came from their solar fields and they said 15%. In the middle of a desert where it’s sunny almost every day.
10 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
WV.Hillbilly 7/1/2022 2:03:37 PM (No. 1203261)
Voodoo energy can never meet the needs of the baseload.
3 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
Ida Lou Pino 7/1/2022 2:12:17 PM (No. 1203270)
Brian - - you're still one "conversion" short.
Your quest for Truth will be fulfilled - - only when you realize that "gullible warming" and "climate change" are lies - - hoaxes conjured up by evil people and/or communists.
Once you accept that you've been lied to - - by corrupt people - - you'll be a much happier man.
3 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
Ida Lou Pino 7/1/2022 2:20:05 PM (No. 1203276)
#10 - - you are in big trouble!
You referred to "Ayer's Rock" - - a white colonialist name for the aboriginal Uluru. Expect to be put in leg irons - - by the Garland Gestapo.
I too have visited "that place" - - driving 291 miles through the vast red desert from Alice Springs - - an amazing desolate wonderland - - despoiled by ugly man-made machines - - without a peep from the "greens" and "environmentalists."
2 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
Rumblehog 7/1/2022 2:45:17 PM (No. 1203296)
Nuclear is Utopian. Leftist Hollywood pretty much ruined that for all of us in the 1970's thanks to the Jane Fonda movie, "The China Syndrome." Three Mile Island was a nothing-burger and Chernobyl was an ancient Soviet machine run by idiots that was not representative of a western reactor, much less workforce.
Today the left is beginning to admit that Nuclear is the way to go... just in time for France to sell us their much improved reactors after we gave up our industry dominance 45 years ago. Coincidence? I don't think so.
4 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
TexaTucky 7/1/2022 4:08:03 PM (No. 1203417)
I loved reading that, #8.
2 people like this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
F15 Gork 7/1/2022 4:09:37 PM (No. 1203421)
I sat here this morning and watched my neighbor behind me have his solar panels removed....wonder what that’s all about.
1 person likes this.
Reply 17 - Posted by:
FLCracker 7/1/2022 4:43:13 PM (No. 1203468)
Di-lithium crystals. Hey, if the can keep the Enterprise running ...
1 person likes this.
Reply 18 - Posted by:
Pat26.2 7/2/2022 3:50:17 PM (No. 1204518)
He still believes CO2 emissions are causing climate change.
Reducing CO2 emissions has had and will not have any significant impact on climate. CO2 concentrations are measured in parts per million. If it was measured as a percentage, it would comprise 0.04% of the atmosphere. The computer climate models assume that CO2 drives global temperatures, rather than solar cycles and Earth's orbital shifts. The models have been an utter failure over the last 25 years. Their predictions have been worthless, except for generating bogus IPCC reports and panicked headlines.
But lets get back to CO2. All life on Earth ultimately depends on CO2. If concentrations fall below 0.015%, photosynthesis stops and plant life dies out, followed shortly thereafter by animal life. Maybe early single cell organisms that don't depend on photosynthesis will survive, but that's about it. Hare-brained schemes to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere are potentially putting life on Earth at risk. Are you listening, Mr. Gates?
Let's ask another question that's rarely asked. Where did the evil carbon in fossil fuels come from? It was all once in the atmosphere. Ancient plants and other organisms absorbed carbon from atmospheric CO2 and then got fossilized, locking that carbon away over geological time scales. The records show that CO2 levels in the ancient atmosphere were up to 15 times higher than today, yet the planet survived.
So, as I see it, burning fossil fuels is recycling on a grand scale. The plants love it and so should we.
1 person likes this.
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