Stossel and Epstein on 'Renewable Failure'

John Stossel quotes a German-born green activist -- and energy advocate Alex Epstein -- in a column about wind and solar.

Both "renewable" sources continue to fail to provide reliable (let alone cheap or abundant) energy even after forty years of subsidies and relentless promotion.

Here's where Stossel transitions between the rote bromides of the former and the incisive talking points of the latter:

Image by Karsten Würth, via Unsplash, license.

"The wind doesn't always come up when the sun goes down," I point out.

"Renewables are clearly better," Neumann replies.

She says we'll solve renewable energy's inconsistency by doing things like storing energy in batteries.

Well, yes, a battery that holds energy for weeks would make renewables work. But it doesn't exist.

"This is just a total fantasy, which is why nobody has done it anywhere, ever!" says Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.

Fossil fuels are moral, Epstein correctly points out, because human flourishing depends on them. [format edits]

There's much more of each in the piece, but perhaps the most striking thing is the fact that Stossel sought out Johanna Neumann in light of her mother country's self-imposed energy shortages and dependence on Russia -- which is helping fund the invasion of Ukraine.

There is, evidently, zero assimilation or processing on Neumann's part of data that should at least give her pause.

In the meantime, Epstein runs circles around her and her entire movement, reminding us that fossil fuels are, at least at this juncture, indispensable for our continued prosperity, including mitigating whatever effects of global warming there might be.

-- CAV