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This week, we’ve got Powerline’s Steve Hayward sitting in for Rob Long (who’s busy being lionized) as we bid a sad so long to Conservative radio icon Rush Limbaugh. Then, Ayaan Hirsi Ali stops by to discuss her new book Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights. Also, be sure to visit her new website and subscribe to her new podcast. Also, Ted Cruz defies The Wall and goes to Mexico, a break down of the latest McConnell v. Trump cage match, and one of our hosts is very excited about Perseverance landing safely on Mars and one of them responded with a big “meh.” Care to guess which is which?
Music from this week’s show: My City Was Gone by The Pretenders
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I’m guessing James excited and Peter “meh”. When do I get my prize?
Wind power still is, and really always has been, all about the graft/grift. Unless the technology has greatly improved in just the past few weeks, last I heard the windmills still don’t generate enough power over their lifetime, to cover the amount of energy consumed in their construction, installation, operation, and decommissioning/disposal.
European leaders and “native” populations are fighting a losing battle against muslim extremism and violence etc because as Mark Steyn wrote about 15 years ago now, those people are disappearing because they aren’t having children to replace themselves. It doesn’t matter how many laws they create to “require” assimilation, banning hijabs in public, etc. All the muslims have to do is wait as the “native” European population declines to the point where the muslims can take control. Then the law changes from BANNING hijabs etc to REQUIRING hijabs.
I thought France was decommissioning nuclear plants, and not building new ones. Did that change recently?
Yes, though slowly, and I think they will actually reverse course on this at some point.
That would be nice. I guess because of our size, it takes longer for the overall US population to get stupid, and then longer to get at least partly un-stupid again.
Although it’s different applications, I liked Ace’s joke during the Obama presidency, and it will fit now, that they wanted to solve our problems by taking us to the nineteenth century. Two big pushes were trains (high speed rail) and windmills (wind turbines). During my drives through western Texas I sometimes see an old style windmill with five or six new windmills nearby. The juxtaposition is interesting.
I want to know the fully depreciated cost of electricity from a wind turbine. I just heard that those damn things only last 10 years.
Separate from the climate change stuff, I’d like to know how bad clean coal really is. It’s the cheapest and most resilient form of energy ever invented, which means it creates a great deal of wealth. That has to count for something. Even natural gas has huge logistical issues because it’s basically just-in-time over pipes.
I once heard a physicist explain the math of renewables and he said they were ridiculous. I have a feeling it’s all stupid except for dispersed, unsubsidized solar. My understanding is solar only pencils out south of Oklahoma City.
What is the point of forcing electric cars by gunpoint if you don’t have all nuclear power?
Even better: the used-up blades cannot be recycled because of their complex construction. There is only one landfill in the US that is taking them, and the space they take up in a landfill is immense.
Stupid squared.
It shocks the consciousness if you just look into it a little bit. The GOP really needs to seize the moment and wipe this idiocy out.
The local environmental lobbyist tried to tell me on Twitter that forcing electric cars at gunpoint was the same thing as rural electrification. lol I really don’t think so. From what I can tell, not even the Internet or anything else is going to be as big of a deal as pumping electricity into household. Probably cold fusion would do it.
(I’ve been screwing around making Boston brown bread. I started doing it without a cake mixer. Good Lord I would kill myself if I had to do that without electricity all the time.)
These guys don’t get that out right wealth can fix or compensate for a lot of problems.
The Thursday examining politics podcast was really good on the dynamics in Texas and in general. It was short.
because then they can push public transportation – every lefty loves trains
Nein, non, Germany and France will not again be at each other’s throats. Germany is a healthy democracy, and if it is flawed, as are all human institutions, such tends to stem in my view from pig-headed liberalism. As in the United States, it seems, what conservatives regard as common sense is all too quickly denounced as “far-right extremism” and “racism.” There is an important difference: In Germany, there are clear laws against certain forms of political expression. Display of Nazi symbols is, for example, criminalized, and whereas das Horst-Wessel-Lied can be accessed on the Internet where I live (no, I don’t listen to it!), it is blocked in Germany and Austria.
As a speaker of German, French, and Italian, I like to joke that the French are Germans who think that they are somehow Italians. They have clearly benefited from their EU partnership with Germany, unlike the Italians, who are fond of saying that they are a land twixt “Europe” and Africa…
On another note, I often listened to Rush Limbaugh in my car here in Japan, thanks to the US Armed Forces Radio. As the familiar music came on, I would lean back into the driver’s seat and exclaim: “Lay it on us, Rush!” Along with his show (limited to one hour), there was a left-wing rival for another hour, along with ever so slick NPR, which I have called Nacional Peeple’s Radio. Even so, there were apparently complaints that the US military should not be “poisoning” the airwaves with El Rushbo. When my American friends heard that I was a listener, they expressed outrage and indignation. “Have you ever tuned in?” I asked. “We don’t need to!” they insisted and then resorted to the usual name-calling…
When William Buckley died, RL gave a movingly personal, charming, and mildly self-deprecating account of how they first met. I hope they are now renewing their friendship in an infinitely better world.
In any electrical entity, regulated or not, there’s an enormous level of complexity involved in the generation (nuclear, coal, gas, hydro, fossil generation of any kind, renewables – solar, wind, etc), transmission (giant powerlines that carry the energy generated at a plant to substations), and distribution (substations down to your friendly neighborhood telephone pole, servicing individual homes or commercial entities).
It used to be much simpler. But the broader portfolio of generation sources, some brought about by mandate, law, activism, or subsidy exploitation, creates down stream challenges in both generating base load power and balancing that power on an ongoing basis. Storms and other emergencies make this much more challenging.
Tack on top of that that many utilities also have a natural gas component, for heating and commercial use. That’s it own separate pipeline infrastructure, with pressures that have to be constantly monitored and adjusted, and 3rd party gas suppliers feed into, on specifically timed amounts and locations, so as to maintain the right pressures in the line (not too much or too little). Much of this infrastructure is maintained via remote devices, most commonly connected via cellular, so, when, for instance, someone blows up an AT&T location, you suddenly lose connection to your devices in the field – you literally won’t know what’s going on unless you dispatch a field tech to get a reading on a line somewhere in East Danish, Tennessee.
SCADA systems overview
The same problems Texas finds itself in, occasionally, with a more isolated grid and less regulation, is mirrored in another disastrous way when it’s overly regulated, especially in terms of supply, Keystone being a good example. Getting permitting for larger-scale projects to transport gas (Atlantic Coast Pipeline just got shut down last year) is almost impossible, despite gas being the one ready generation source that can be available on standby and spun up almost immediately if other generation sources shut down.
Making gas less available helps create the conditions for prices spikes and unavailability, just when it’s needed the most. And that’s good policy?
The emphasis should be on clean coal and compact nuke. #15 is very persuasive.
No problem, just invent the fusion torch. Recycling at the atomic level!
I think this depends on siting. In pleasant dry places they last for 30 years (but are probably obsolete after 15). In off shore, they last about 10. Think about those dangerous catch shows. Maintenance is a nightmare.
Coal is the cheapest (3 cents/KWH), but regulatory uncertainty makes it a billion dollar plant a poor (risky) investment. In some places (TX, PA, NM, OK) natural gas is the cheapest. Some days, the cost of natural gas is negative! (by product of oil). Building pipelines and transmission lines is very expensive and stopped by NIMBY. As for reliability, coal will have 30 days of on-site storage. Natural gas will have a few minutes. Natural gas is quick to start (hours), which is important for matching demand.
Solar is a disaster. It depends on “slave” labor in China and has no storage.
The best things are hydro and nuclear. The environmentalists have reversed (canceled) our past investments in this cheap and reliable sources.
As for Texas, remember it is cities that choose their power sources. Austin is run by neo-socialists and have idled coal plants to buy fake green power. I am sure the mayor enjoys his environmental awards, while ignoring the poor people that are literally dying. Cold Kills. Cheap power = prosperity.
Among other subsidies that wind power enjoys beyond the $22 per MwH “production tax credit,” is accelerated depreciation, so using standard depreciation calculations for wind is an apple-to-oranges problem.
Current wind power turbines are supposed to have more than 20 year lifespan, but however long it is, apparently they can’t be recycled, and many of those enormous blades are being simply landfilled.
There Are No Poor People In Austin.
They have declared it.
Thank you for interviewing the incomparable and intellectually engaging Ms. Ali. I’ve been following her work since she joined AEI in 2006 and had the good fortune of hearing her in person back then. Her fierce objections to the violence of female genital mutilation is a subject still not quite approachable here in the US – an incident in which Muslim girls in Minnesota and Michigan were being subject to but lawmakers experienced ‘backlash’ for trying to prosecute those involved. It’s very much related to what Peter and James brought up about assimilation and integration into nationalistic norms. When we vilify as racist or cultural xenophobia anyone or anything broaching the subject of immigration and cultural partitioning, we fail to have nuanced discussions about the problems these issues foster and their persistence breeds more separation. Solutions become an impossibility and pushes extremism as its own ideology in contrast to inaction. Another great listen. Thanks to Mr. Hayward for subbing and the tribute to Rush. James last monologue on space exploration is well worth staying till the end. Well done.
The only thing Texas did wrong was to fall into some lefty traps for windmill subsidies etc. They should have been smarter, but it’s still leftism that really caused the problems, not conservatism or Republicans.
A great deal of modern technology, especially electronics in general and computers in particular, has come out of space research. GOVERNMENT-FUNDED space research. If @peterrobinson wanted to be consistent about opposing taxpayer-funded space research, he should still be using a typewriter.
I wouldn’t spend a penny on space unless it was a negligible budget issue.
Having said that, I just recently learned that during the Cold War we had to win the space race because we had to make the communists look bad.
I hope you’re joking. You don’t understand how the benefits of advanced technology coming from space research has improved life in other ways? Even stuff like the advanced metallurgy that goes into high-power electric generators that power the country from natural gas, etc? And so much more.
If you are talking about experiments that can be only done in space, I get it. I don’t agree with the general sentiment. To be clear I’m not an expert on any of this, I’m mostly going by what libertarian type people say about it. What I’m getting at is, the concept of basic science research funded by the government is probably pretty bogus.
It may very well be that privately-funded research would eventually make all the discoveries that space research came up with, although I doubt it because much of the civilian benefits are from less-expensive versions which means that things like the metallurgy used in commercial flight is a lower level – and far less expensive version – of advances made in the pursuit of rocket engines etc. But I’m very confident that even if it did, it would have taken MUCH LONGER to get there. Would you be okay with using a Univac – although you couldn’t possibly afford one – for another 50-100 years because it was space technology research that led to the microchip and hence the Personal Computer? (Although Univac was largely invented for government/military purposes, and even the original mechanically-handled Hollerith card system came about to handle government tasks: census, etc.)
All I’m saying is, you would think the government could figure out what would fit in the basic research category and it would pay off. Supposedly, it doesn’t.
I would expect government, especially, to be bad at that. One thing about space research is that it involves a particular goal to be reached. However inefficient government may be, it works better when there is a definite goal.
P.S. And there are also still communists to be beaten.
If they want to study space, that’s fine, especially if it’s unmanned. I’m just skeptical of all of these side things that are supposedly developed.
It sounds like NASA getting to the moon was a big deal in making communism look bad to countries that could go either way. I have no idea. I just learned that in like the last year.