How Wishful Thinkers Are Forced to Reconnect With Energy Reality

The above name piece from myself and Michael Economides is published this morning here over at the Investors Business Daily. (A fussier title than mine. I had it simply as 'The Energy Disconnect'). 

It's something I've been wanting to make a point about for some time - that there is a massive difference between the political and green rhetoric and the economic and energy reality (i.e. what is actually achievable).

Here's a taster:

"Capitalism and consumerism have brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse," the U.K.'s Prince of Wales ruminates, adding that "the age of convenience is over." As international columnist Mark Steyn comments, "The Prince then got in his limo and was driven to his other palace."

Today, the Obama White House is recycling all the same European political energy rhetoric so familiar to Europeans. Yet, the U.S. has its own instructive case study.

One day billionaire T. Boone Pickens has a Grand Wind Plan for Texas, with further plans to forest the nation with turbines "from Canada to Mexico." The next, T. Boone drops his wind plan in favor of .. . a hydrocarbon (natural gas) solution instead.

As we have seen, however, national leaders will ultimately refuse to impoverish their industries even to "save the planet." The still-"disconnected" flower-power generation and its idealistic offspring would do well to grasp that the energy future is not green. It is hydrocarbon, and will continue to be for another century at least.

Perhaps it's just that we have yet to learn a language they'll understand? Maybe we should run the energy stats past them one more time, make a peace V-sign and (gently) ask: "Reconnected yet, man?"