The last decade has seen three big booms in the U.S. economy:
- The Internet boom
- The Housing boom
- The Military boom
Each boom has resulted in large scandals. One reason Americans soured on the Iraq War may have been that those scandals were not treated as real war-time scandals are treated. (A correction before going on. Many people, including me, talk about the need for a Truman Commission to fight war profiteering. The actual Truman Commission dealt with education issues after World War II. We’re really referring to the Truman Committee, at left, which Truman chaired during the war and which went after war profiteers.)
Real war-time scandals are treated very, very seriously. Procurement scandals in war time hamper the war effort. They do the enemy’s work for him. They are not just unpatriotic, but in the view of many patriots they are treason.
When I suggest we treat The War Against Oil as a real war, this is one of the things I’m talking about.
Already, even before it starts, we see some frothiness in the market. I’ve discussed how the term Alternative Energy is a canard. But as The New York Times reports, excitement over green energy has many of the same players from the bad-old dot-com days coming back for more.
And we can’t depend on the media to police any of this, as evidenced by the lead paragraph in Matt Richel’s story.
Out of the ashes of the Internet bust, many technology veterans have regrouped and found a new mission in alternative energy: developing wind power, solar panels, ethanol plants and hydrogen-powered cars.
Ethanol plants? That’s not all. We’re also seeing hype in nuclear
energy, in coal, and even in domestic oil and gas — all promoted as
green. Which it’s not.
“It’s like 1996,” said Andrew
Beebe, one of the remade Internet entrepreneurs. In the boom, he ran
Bigstep.com, which helped small businesses sell online. Today, he is
president of Energy Innovations, which makes low-cost solar panels.
“The Valley has found a new hot spot.”
Beebe, by the way, is now working for Bill Gross (right, from David Strick), one of
the most vile of the dot-com shysters. You may remember Bill from such
hits as IdeaLab and GoTo.com.
I certainly do. I distinctly remember Bill speaking at a trade
conference a decade ago telling people to just imagine businesses, and
he would make them happen.
Well, Bill Gross now imagines he’s in the energy business. God help us.
The War Against Oil is going to take a lot more than dreams. And unless
the market is properly regulated, a lot of the money invested in it
over the next two years is going down a rat hole. Not that much of that
money won’t be lost — it will. That’s the nature of venture capital.
But if it’s going to a smile and a story, that should be treated as
more than an ordinary scam.
It ought to be treated as treason.
Nuclear power is a hell of a lot greener than ethanol, coal, or natural gas. This is especially true if we look at modern technology and not the 30+ year-old stuff we have in the US. The religious bias that most environmentalists have is akin to cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. It is going to be decades before hydrogen is a viable option and in the mean time we still need to get our energy from somewhere. Relying heavily on Nuclear in the interim is one of the best possible options, once we take blind anti-nuclear hysteria out of the equation.
Nuclear power is a hell of a lot greener than ethanol, coal, or natural gas. This is especially true if we look at modern technology and not the 30+ year-old stuff we have in the US. The religious bias that most environmentalists have is akin to cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. It is going to be decades before hydrogen is a viable option and in the mean time we still need to get our energy from somewhere. Relying heavily on Nuclear in the interim is one of the best possible options, once we take blind anti-nuclear hysteria out of the equation.