That we should do something about climate change is fair enough, the future will be poorer than it needs to be if we don’t. This doesn’t mean that we should be doing the Green New Deal, so beloved of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and nearly every Democrat so far announced as running for the presidency. The reason is China’s announcement that they’re about to launch satellites to provide solar power to us down here.
It’s not just the specific which is the issue either, that this or that piece of technology or investment has been left out of the calculations. It’s that nearly everything has been left out.
I’ll illustrate this with a different story. In my native Britain, the pubs used to close early. So, the law was changed and it’s possible to have civilized drinking hours, off into the small hours of the night and early morning. We’ve more recently found that fewer places want to try and have these extended hours. The blame, or cause perhaps, is put upon dating apps.
Some, at least, used late-night drinking places as sources of healthy and physical fun for consenting adults. Now that can be found through other technologies, the availability of boozing places is less necessary. It’s illustration of the planners’ problem. It’s not just that we must design a manner of gaining the desired goal, it’s that we can, will even, be blindsided by entirely new technologies, new methods of doing things to achieve the same goal. What we’ve built through our planning becomes redundant.
So, it is with this idea of decarbonizing the American energy system. I’m not as worried as many others about the speed this needs to be done at, but I’m fine with the idea that we might do it. It’s the how, not the whether, that interests me. The Green New Deal insists that we do it with today’s technologies at an estimated cost of $93 trillion. If that’s the only way to do it then maybe it’s worth it even at that price tag. But, of course, it isn’t the only way.
Take transportation, for example. We’d like there to be fewer emissions from it. Great, so, what should be the method? We all have battery-powered cars? We just drive smaller-engined ones? We work from home? We move to be closer to work and have a shorter commute? We have public transport? Obviously enough, all of these are partial cures, and taken together they’d be a complete one. But, what should be the balance between them in our journey to that total solution? That’s not something we can know in advance. We can only set up the correct incentives and see how it pans out.
That is, this isn’t something we can plan. It’s too complex, it’s something we’ve got to use markets for.
Then there’s this China satellite story. It’s long been known that we can and possibly should have solar panels up in space, Jerry Pournelle was writing about it in the 1980s. We even know how to do it up to, and including, the beaming of the power back down to us. The telemetry for that has been around since the 1960s when we started to put ICBMs into submarines. Unfortunately, we also know that it would be grossly expensive. Or, perhaps, that it would have been so.
We’d be able to buy an awful lot of such space-based solar power with $93 trillion of course, but even so, at the prices of the past it still wouldn’t make sense. The cost killer is the price of putting anything up into orbit. We can physically do everything. We’ve got all the technologies. It just doesn’t make financial sense.
Except, well, what is it that Blue Origin, SpaceX, and all the rest are doing? They’re slicing orders of magnitude off the costs of getting something into orbit. We’re now seriously talking again about having a base or two on the Moon, something that would in itself again slice orders of magnitude off building anything in space, including in Earth orbit. Sorry, that’s just how celestial mechanics work: It’s cheaper to build a base 250,000 miles away on the Moon and then ship stuff back to Earth than it is to send stuff up directly the 25,000 miles to geostationary orbit, in any great volume at least.
That is, one (and only one, this is an example) of the things undercutting the economics of that Green New Deal is the way that Elon Musk is making rockets cheaper. How cheap is he going to make them? We don’t know. How good are any of the other technologies under development going to get? Again, we’ve not a clue. But that deal faces that problem of every planners’ dream. They’re ignoring what the rest of the world is going to do around them as they pursue their fantasies. They’re not even considering that someone’s out there writing a dating app.
Space-based solar energy is a complete and total solution to climate change woes in a technological sense. It might even make sense in an economic one, as might many other technologies and changes unthought of and unconsidered by the Green New Deal, which is exactly what the problem with the Deal is.
We’re facing a problem, given changing technology, which is just too difficult to plan through. We can’t use bureaucracy and government to direct actions when we face this uncertainty. But that’s what the plan insists upon and that’s why it’s the wrong thing to be doing.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
