Tag Archives: Energy

Why did India have so many blackouts in the first half of 2026?

India is no longer a poor country. With a record-setting services industry and a very large production industry, India can afford to have its cake and eat it just like a rich country.

Yet in 2026, I read reports of rolling blackouts across the whole country, especially difficulty to deal with as temps both day and night can remain above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).

Most reports (like this one) brush past causes. At best they try to blame the blackouts on surging demand. But rising demand can be predicted, and creates an incentive to increase supply. So we should expect that power companies, if they wanted to make money, could have easily built out their production sector to meet the growing demand.

That is exactly what has happened in America, where power demand continues to grow, but blackouts remain uncommon. And unlike America, India still uses cheap coal for the majority of its energy needs, so what gives?

Well it seems India’s power problems came from a toxic mix of rising energy costs and government incompetence. One or the other would be manageable, but the two together dealt a 1-2 punch to India’s power sector that left customers sweating in the heat of summer. Let’s dig in, shall we?

The first thing to realize is that not all coal is created equal. India still maintains the world’s second largest coal mining operations, after China. So in theory their power plants should never run out of coal, right? Except India’s coal is notorious for being made of almost 50% unburnable rocks, what the industry calls “ash content.” This high ash content means boilers that burn Indian coal need to be larger and have more scrubbers in order to deal with all that ash, making them more expensive.

For this reason, coal power plants on India’s coast have actually transitioned to using foreign coal rather than Indian coal. Australian coal in particular is very low ash, as little as 10%, and so a much smaller boiler and many fewer scrubbers can be used to produce the same amount of power. Some plants will also use a specific mix of Indian and foreign coal, to create an intermediate ash content of perhaps 25%-40%. This lets them save some space compared to using only Indian coal, while also not having to import quite so much expensive foreign coal.

But the Iran war threw all of this for a loop. When the war shut down oil and natural gas flow through the Strait of Hormuz, many poorer nations in Southeast Asia switched on their coal power plants to replace their unusable oil and natural gas power plants. It was that or have no power at all, since there was such a shortage of oil and natural gas. This drove the price of coal skyward.

Now, India itself still produces plenty of coal, no problem there. But the cost of high quality *imported* coal was a problem. All these power plants that relied on buying foreign coal suddenly found themselves with skyrocketing import costs. That would usually be no problem, they would raise prices on consumers to compensate. No one likes expensive power, but expensive power is way the hell better than *no power at all*. But this is where the governments of India’s many states stepped in.

No politician wants to lose election, and so no government wants to be responsible for rising prices. But the money must still be paid for that imported coal, so did the government step in to subsidize the power stations? Did they bollocks. No politician wants to be responsible for skyrocketing public debt either, *nor* increasing public taxes. The governments forbade the power plants from raising prices, but also didn’t give them money to compensate.

So could the power companies take out loans? Again no, India’s state-owned power companies have been oceans of bad debt for years as local governments didn’t want to fund them and so have demanded local banks give them roll-over loans for years. Modi finally stepped in and forbade new loans going to any power company that isn’t somewhat solvent. And that rules out any power plant that is selling power for less than the price of imported coal (as demanded by the politicians).

India’s solar buildout has only worsened this problem, as there are no batteries to store the solar power. See, solar power plants are only responsible for providing power during the day, and when it’s sunny. But they get the gain of still being able to demand full price in competition with the *coal* power plants, which are responsible for power both day and night, sunny or cloudy. Solar plants have all the profit, but none of the responsibility that baseload coal plants have.

This means that when solar power cuts off during the evening, or during a cloudy spell, the coal plants must quickly ramp their power supply up to compensate. An expensive process which would be mitigated if those plants just provided all the power during both day and night. India would normally use natural gas “peakers” for ramping power, but remember that natural gas was expensive and the state governments wouldn’t raise prices to compensate.

So what is a power plant to do, when it cannot afford to import more coal because the state governments won’t let it raise prices to compensate AND it cannot take out loans to bridge the gap? It goes down for “maintenance” or declares “load-shedding.” The former is often used an excuse for “we literally cannot supply power at this time,” and the latter is just a euphemism for a blackout.

Loadshedding increased in India severely during 2026, but is falling back down as energy prices now return to normal.

If governments allowed coal companies to raise prices to compensate, this crisis would not have happened. If solar plants were required to compensate coal plants for taking on all the nighttime/cloud-time sectoral risk, this would not have happened. And of course, if the energy crisis had not happened, this would not have happened.

But it did happen, and the Indian state governments cannot control the world, they can only control themselves and their laws. And their obstinance in the face of high prices meant their states suffered greatly due to a complete *lack* of power, when they could instead have had *expensive* power. Economists agree that the GDP hit is vastly greater in the former case than the latter, and I’m sure anyone sweltering or *dying* in a non-air conditioned room would think so too. A shame the politicians couldn’t see it.

Fusion power: The tritium problem

In my previous post on fusion power, I discussed how fusion power will not be possible on Earth without using tritium. I then discussed how Tritium is exceptionally *rare* on Earth (the entire planet has only enough Tritium to power Chicago for a month or so). Now I will discuss why it won’t be possible to make enough Tritium to solve this pressing issue with fusion power. Thus I hope to answer the question posed in my first post: fusion power is hopeless (within my lifetime at least).

The 25kg of Tritium produced by Canada’s CANDU fission reactors represents the sum total of all the tritium here on Earth. If fusion advocates want to have enough Tritium to start up loads of fusion power plants, they’ll need a lot more than that.

The first method may be to just produce more tritium the way Canada does. The CANDU reactors use heavy water (water with the hydrogen-1 atoms replaced with hydrogen-2 aka deuterium) to moderate free neutrons and cool the system. When the deuterium in the water interacts with a neutron, it may capture it and transform into tritium (aka hydrogen-3). This tritium is highly radioactive with a half-life of just 12ish years, so Canada separates it out and stores it in shielded containers.

To get a tiny bit more technical: a single atom of uranium-235 undergoes fission and releases either 2 or 3 neutrons (average 2.5). 1 neutron is needed to keep the fission reaction going, 1 neutron can hit deuterium and transform it into tritium, and we can estimate that the remaining 0.5 neutrons will be lost due to hitting some other atom in the area that isn’t deuterium or uranium.

But now we have a process to create tritium, so can’t we just scale it up? Unfortunately no, this is unfeasible. Remember that it takes 1 atom of uranium (which weighs 235 atomic units) to create 1 unit of tritium (which weighs 3 atomic units). 235 ÷ 3 is about 78, so it takes 78 kilograms of ultra-enriched uranium to produce a single kilogram of tritium. The CANDU reactors themselves don’t even use highly enriched uranium, their uranium contains only about 1% U-235, so for them it takes 780 kg of uranium for each 1 kg of tritium they produce.

Even if we could ensure that extra 0.5 neutrons wasn’t lost, that doesn’t get us very far. And to be honest, even this math undersells the problem. That 780 kg of uranium to produce 1 kg of tritium *only works if we extract every single possible neutron from the fissile uranium*. In practice, the nature of half-lives means that the uranium produces most of its neutrons quite early and then neutron production quickly decreases, to the point that it’s producing too few neutrons to reliably continue a chain reaction. The actual CANDU reactors replace their uranium regularly to maintain a high enough level of neutrons, and they use about 100,000 kg of uranium to produce about 0.1 kg of tritium each year. That is just too much uranium (all of which needs significant work to keep it safe and secure) to feasibly scale this process up to produce lots and lots of tritium.

Sure there are other neutron source, and other targets for producing tritium. But the math is still the same. You need an extraordinary amount of some very heavy element (the kind that undergoes fission) to create a tiny amount of a very light element (tritium). Those heavy, fissionable elements are very dangerous and pose potential national security threats, so must be treated with high levels of security. The tritium is *also* dangerous, but has the added problem of requiring extra steps to separate it from the heavy-water mix that it’s a part of. Producing tritium with fission is a dead end if we want enough of it for fusion.

But of course no one wants to produce tritium using fission, they want to produce tritium using *fusion*, and here’s where our problem goes from bad to worse.

Most tritium-fusion advocates have a clear picture in their mind of how it will work:

  • Tritium and deuterium will fuse in a reactor, and this fusion will produce neutrons
  • The reactor will be surrounded by a blanket of (usually) lithium
  • The lithium will absorb a neutron and undergo fission, creating a new unit of tritium
  • That tritium will be fed back into the fusion process, continuing the cycle indefinitely

It all seems to simple, but every single step of this has problems, and no one has yet even demonstrated a coherent *plan*, let alone demonstrated a practical *system* for creating and extracting tritium in this way. It’s akin to saying “fusion is easy, just get the atoms close together” without having any plan for how to do that.

First, the high energy neutron created during fusion carries 80% of the reactions heat energy. That means it can’t just be used to create new tritium, if we want this reactor to actually be a *power plant*, we need that neutron to also boil water and drive a steam turbine. That means 1 neutron per fusion reaction isn’t enough.

So we add elements to the lithium blanket that “breed” more neutrons. These elements, when hit by a neutron, create 2 or more neutrons in turn. Great, now we can turn 1 neutron into as many as we want, with some of those neutrons being allowed to produce heat for our steam turbine, and the others creating tritium to go back into the reaction. Mission solved, right?

But this creates our first fundamental problem with the blanket. We have a blanket of solid lithium, plus beryllium and/or lead to act as neutron multipliers, and that blanket is constantly being destroyed by neutrons *as a necessary step to produce more tritium*.

This blanket isn’t *just* there for making neutrons mind you, it will also need to carry away the heat energy from those neutrons to be used to boil water. That means it will need all the steel piping, diagnostic sensors, and other components necessary to safely transfer heat away. That means the blanket needs a lot of non-lithium components in it, and those components *can also be destroyed by the fast neutrons*. Then again, as the lithium in the blanket is already expected to be destroyed by the fast neutrons, that can compromise the precise structural system needed for heat to be transferred and for diagnostic sensors to get an accurate reading. A single microscopic crack in the blanket could through the entire system into chaos, and a crack is inevitable when the whole point of the blanket is to be destroyed.

Not to mention the helium problem. A neutron can pass through a few atoms of lithium before it hits one to create tritium. That tritium can get locked within the structure of the wall and beta-decay into helium-3 before it can be extracted. Helium-3 can build up inside the walls of the reactor, and it aggregates together since it can’t bind to the steel or other elements that make up the wall. These cavities of helium-3 reduce the structural integrity of the whole system, as you suddenly have a section of wall sitting on top of gaseous helium instead of solid steel. This again is catastrophic to structural integrity, and it’s hard to make helium obey you at the best of times, even worse when it’s trapped inside a metal lattice. So it won’t be so easy to just remove the helium from the system.

But even if you magically create a wall that won’t be destroyed through neutron damage, and can breed enough new tritium to continue the reaction, there is no working proposal to extract that tritium and feed it back into the reactor. If the lithium blanket is a solid wall, then new tritium will be trapped inside that blanket, it cannot simply flow out straight through a solid wall. You might try to inject helium purge gas, to purge out all the trapped tritium, but now you have a different problem.

Those high energy neutrons are dumping enormous amounts of heat into this wall as well, there will be violent thermocycling as the walls heat with neutron radiation and are then desperately cooled back down by heat exchange (this heat is needed, remember, to boil the water for the steam turbine). The areas of the wall containing lithium will be crushed or sintered together, blocking any helium from removing the trapped tritium within.

Finally, a solid wall of steel and lithium with have thermal conductivity that is unpredictable and well-nigh impossible to model. The elements will touch as microscopic points, and those points will again move around as the wall expands and contracts from thermal forces. So you won’t have a wall that heats evenly and can be cooled evenly. Some patches will hit thousands of degrees and can warp or melt the wall if they aren’t cooled down fast enough.

So then maybe a solid wall won’t work for us, but how about a liquid wall? Lithium and our neutron multiplier atoms can be heated to hundreds of degrees until they liquify. Then we can surely have a homogenous liquid that heats and cools evenly, where helium cannot get trapped in solid lattices, and we can pass this liquid over chemical filters to extract all of the precious tritium from within. Simple right?

But this is even less probable of a solution. A river of molten lithium is highly conductive, and as it needs to be pumped through and around the high powered magnetic fields of the fusion reactor, it will trigger an unbelievable electromagnetic braking force. Remember the “braking radiation” I discussed in the previous post? We aren’t done with electromagnetics ruining our nuclear party. The conductive liquid metal passing through the magnetic fields will create a massive *secondary* magnetic field that acts to oppose the moving conductive fluid that created it. So our river of molten lithium will suddenly create a powerful force pushing it in the *opposite direction* that we need it to go in, forcing an ungodly amount of pumping power to be spent just to force it to move the correct way.

Then there’s the fact that a river of molten lithium will be highly corrosive, trying to tear down whatever piping infrastructure we’re using to pump it.

And finally, we still aren’t done with tritium problems. Yes it’s easier to remove tritium from a river of molten lithium than a lattice of solid lithium, but we still have a problem. Tritium diffuses through solid metals at high temperatures, meaning it will quickly leak out of our molten lithium, through the plumbing, and into any water we’re using as a coolant for this whole nightmare of a system (remember, we still NEED water coolant to drive our steam turbine if this thing will make any power!). This doesn’t just steal the tritium we need to continue the reaction, it produces tritiated water, highly radioactive and a severe biological safety hazard.

So no, we can’t *just make more tritium* to run our fusion power plants. We can’t just scale up our systems for creating tritium from fission. And any proposal to make tritium from the fusion itself is still an entirely separate unsolved problem, *on top of the unsolved problem of making fusion power in the first place*. The tritium created will try its level best to destroy whatever wall or plumbing infrastructure we use to create it. It will decay into helium-3, which will try even harder to do the same. And the wall itself is an unsolved problem of heat exchange, hydrodynamic forces, gas exchange, and structural integrity, all of which has to be *perfect* so that enough tritium is secured to continue the reaction.

And sure, you can lose a few atoms of tritium here and there, but any lost tritium will have to be repaid by redirecting more of the fusion reactor’s neutrons towards tritium and using fewer neutrons to create actually electrical power. You know, *the actual point of a nuclear reactor*. Even getting a positive production of tritium is an untested problem, *without* trying to create any nuclear power whatsoever.

There are some things that work great in a lab bench but just don’t work when scaled up. This is exactly the problem that sank Amyris, a biotech company I blogged about long ago. They had a good foundation of synthetic biology, and they thought they could easily scale up from a benchtop setting that made micrograms of product to a factory setting making the kilograms needed for industrial use. They just couldn’t do it, and they filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2023. It’s not that what they wanted to do is impossible, it’s that it is difficult, expensive, and there are cheaper options available.

That, I think, is what will ultimately sink nuclear fusion for the remainder of my lifetime, not that it’s impossible, that it just isn’t worth it. Any problem humanity faces might be theoretically possible, we could redirect the entire National Science Foundation funding to making better AIs for Civ VI, for example, and we’d certainly get something better than what Firaxis gave us. But is that value for money, compared to everything else the NSF funds? No.

And so, is fusion power possible? If you feed the entire budget of the NSF into it, maybe. But even if we can heat our homes by burning money, that doesn’t make it a good investment. The NSF and other agencies want to fund areas of research that will create their own positive return on investment, that will enter a virtuous cycle where profits from the technology get reinvested into improving the technology further.

The NSF’s investment into genetic engineering did exactly that. In the 1970s, at the same time fusion was being funded and nuclear fission wasn’t yet politically toxic, the NSF was giving tiny amounts of funding to biologists and chemists to study genetics. To find out how we can read and use genes to our advantage. But unlike fusion power, genetics entered a *virtuous cycle*, where their projects were so successful they could start profitable companies with them, and those profitable companies then reinvested back into genetics technology. The human genome project was completed around the year 2000, and in 1970 knowing the entire genome of an individual would have seemed like *more* of a pipedream then getting power out of nuclear fusion (we already had nuclear fission, remember!).

But fusion never entered a virtuous cycle. There were never fusion successes that could go on and make profits to reinvest. And *that* is why fusion was abandoned, not because of some evil conspiracy, but because of simple failure.

Failure which I believe will continue. Because still today, investing in fusion just isn’t worth it. We can get power in a dozen of other ways, so long as we don’t have NIMBYs blocking every solar array or gas turbine needed to power our modern society. And don’t forget that fusion will have to face those same NIMBYs, you can’t compare a theoretical fusion plant to a currently built gas or solar plant. You have to include the NIMBY factor of convincing the same people who think 5G is giving them cancer that fusion power *won’t* give them cancer. Or the same people who don’t want a new apartment because it’s *ugly* that a fusion plant *won’t* be ugly.

The technological limitations of nuclear fusion power are still unsolved. They are solvable but solving them isn’t worth the amount of money needed considering the extreme amount of known unknown and even unknown unknowns. We don’t know how to do it, and we’re better off spending our money on things we do know.

Sure, let the NSF keep funding the national ignition lab, you can even keep funding ITER if you think it will help. But startups like Commonwealth Energy aren’t going to provide power to the grid within my lifetime, and it isn’t worth spending our entire GDP to solve these problems sooner than that.

NIMBYs in the Farmhouse

Short addendum to my previous tirades on NIMBYs blocking data centers: I mostly focus on these being blocked in the cities because, well, I live in a city and I hear what city-folk say about why they are NIMBY about data centers, houses, etc.

But to be true, NIMBYism is universal. I was visiting my aunt a little while ago on the farm she owns with her daughter. Being bored, I picked up the newspaper on her table. Now, the fact that there was a physical newspaper on the table should let you know just how old, and old-fashioned, my aunt is. But the cover story was interesting to me: a proposal to build a large new solar power plant in the area, one that could power much of the nearby city and beyond.

A new solar power plant is no bad thing: it means jobs for construction, jobs for maintenance, and it lowers power costs making everyone’s lives cheaper. Cheap power also tends to attract other power-intensive jobs, bringing even more jobs and wages to a traditional farming area that has been very stagnant for 50 years.

But the locals were not having it. They didn’t like the glare that the panels might give off, they said microplastics and metals would run off during the rain and pollute their aquifer. They said it would take up too much space and be an eyesore, and that it wouldn’t even help them anyway. In short, they were NIMBYs.

Because that’s the NIMBY playbook on everything from houses, to data centers, to power plants:

  • This thing competes with me for amenities and raises their prices.
    • Houses bring residents who use up space in doctor’s offices, schools, and parks, potentially overcrowding them for current residents.
    • Houses and data centers use water and electricity, competing with local residents.
    • All three of these use up space, which locals may wish to use for other things
  • This thing isn’t something I want
    • If you don’t like the new house, you don’t have to live there. But someone else might want it, why not give them a chance?
    • If you don’t like data centers, well just don’t build one then. This one isn’t being built with your money, so let it be built.
    • If you don’t like solar power, well tough cookie. America needs more power, and you use power, so you’ve no right to complain in my eyes.
  • This thing is ugly
    • This complaint is pernicious because anything looks ugly when you already don’t like it for other reasons. There is no amount of facading or art deco that would make some people accept a data center or a solar farm as “beautiful.”
  • This thing will reduce my quality of life
    • The residents of a new apartment block will likely be noisier than the residents of the surrounding houses. They will stay up late, have parties, and invite over their friends. Those friends will then park on the street, reducing the street parking that current residents have come to enjoy. In fact, noise complaints seem to be *the most common complaint* I see over new developments when I listen in to my local planning meetings.
    • The recent buzz is that data centers also create noise. Whoopdidoo.
    • And of course solar panels are indeed made of plastics and some metals. But while there is no evidence that they leach out and contaminate the aquifers, there is no amount of evidence *against this* that would convince the NIMBYs of my aunt’s local town.

I don’t know if that solar power plant will ever get built. The local farmers seemed firmly against it, although the state and municipality were for it so they could well over-ride local demands. Still, I wanted to just point out that this is a textbook case of NIMBYism, and in my eyes these NIMBYs are all the same.

Klein 4: What Ezra Klein’s abundance agenda doesn’t contend with

The answer is trade-offs, Ezra Klein doesn’t contend with trade-offs. But I also wrote the title of this post to reference an old song I heard by a group called “The Klein Four,” check it out, it’s a good song if you like jokes about math and love.

I’ve discussed a lot about Ezra Klein’s abundance agenda before. To remind us, Ezra Klein says the reasons for America’s economic malaise is that we have made it impossible to build the houses, jobs, and infrastructure that we need to bring down costs and bring up wages. Housing costs will go down if we build more houses, so the government should write laws to ensure we can build more houses.

This agenda can seem very “ivory tower,” but has come into sharp focus with the creation of the bipartisan Abundance Caucus, as well as the likely next mayor of New York City coming out in support of the abundance agenda.

But the question that I want to raise is: what political group will be thrown under the bus in pursuit of abundance?

I mean this question honestly. This is not a gotcha, this is not an attack. This is my assertion that abundance *will* require trade-offs, and certain political groups *will oppose* those trade-offs no matter what. In order to enact Abundance then, you will have to choose your trade-offs, and therefore choose who goes under the bus.

Klein is not a politician, and he and his co-author have tried to assert that there really aren’t any trade-offs with abundance. We can keep *all the good things* that he and his co-partisans support without any negative side affects. And likewise the new laws we write to ensure that housing, factories, and infrastructure get built faster and more efficiently will not harm his co-partisan’s priorities whatsoever.

But I think Klein does this because he makes the classic mistake of thinking everyone has the same priorities as he does, they just don’t have the knowledge he does to realize he’s right.

So to start: will Abundance throw unions under the bus, or will it continue to allow them to have veto power over housing projects they don’t like? Josh Barro wrote about this extensively. He points out that unions in blue cities have consistently held up building projects in order to increase their own power. Unions make demands that increase the cost and time-line of a project, and if they don’t get it they use every possible veto point (such as the need to get community approval or the need to do environmental review) to prevent a project from happening.

This creates a trade-off, unions vs abundance. Klein side-steps this and tries to claim that no, there really isn’t a trade-off, and he actually wants to make it radically easier to form a union. But that isn’t important. It’s quite easy to form a union in America, it’s very difficult to exercise union power. Unions are exercising what little power they have when they hold up projects, and they do so in order to ensure the project enriches their members and not non-unionized laborers. Established unions don’t care about forming unions, they’re already established. They care about enriching their members.

So there *is* a trade-off between unions and abundance. Klein tries to handwave that somehow we remove the union veto and give them some other power and that they would accept this as a fair trade. But they simple would not. So if you remove the unions’ ability to veto infrastructure projects, then you throw the unions under the bus. If you don’t remove their veto, you walk back the abundance agenda, because you are failing to make it easier to build housing, infrastructure and jobs.

Or what about environmentalism? Energy is expensive, and it’s a huge barrier to economic growth and the abundance agenda. Right now America pays a lot less for energy than much of Europe because we allow our oil companies to frack oil out of the rocks to release it. But this is an environmental double-whammy, all that fracking harms the environment and burning all that oil accelerates global warming.

Klein’s environmental co-partisans will want to ban fracking and restrict oil, while abundance for consumers may require continued fracking so Americans can use their cars and so America’s economy can continue to use that energy. Germany and the EU have shrinking or stagnating economies in part because the price of energy there is so high.

Again Klein handwaves this by saying that we can make solar panels and solar power so cheap that energy will be cheaper that way. But this ignores present reality. Texas currently is the American leader in energy abundance, with an incredibly permissive permitting regime. It indeed leads America in the installation of solar panels. It also leads America in the fracking of oil.

If solar power were such a sure bet, then Texas energy barons would stop investing in oil and move all their money into solar panels. No company would ever willingly leave money on the table like that. But solar power *is not* a sure bet, and it still has massive difficulties that make oil viable. Battery technology is not sufficient to make solar+batteries cheaper than oil or gas for night-time power. And electric cars still aren’t cheap enough to make American switch over their ICE cars.

You can’t just “abundance” your way into ignoring economics, if you make it easy to permit *any* energy, then you will permit a lot of fossil fuel-based energy solution and piss off environmentalists. If you restrict fossil fuels, you undermine abundance by raising America’s energy prices and making it harder for Americans to drive and making it harder for American companies to operate.

I wanted to write more but I’m a bit tired and this post is very late, it should have been finished two weeks ago. But let me finish with this, every single group that supports abundance has their own group policy that they see as sacrosanct. They will support the removal of *other groups’ policies* but not their own. Abundance will therefore require finding which group is weakest, and removing their policies, or finding some compromise that pleases no one but at least gets things done.

The unions will happily undermine environmentalism and local democracy, but will never support a reduction in union power. Environmentalists will not allow environmental laws to be degraded, but may allow for a reduction in union power and local democracy. And you know what local groups think.

So when you want to build new housing or a new train line through a city, each group will block it until you make the expensive concessions necessary for their support. Abundance is all about removing those expensive concessions so it’s cheaper and easier for America to build. So the question is then clear: which group will be thrown under the bus. Until the Abundance Agenda has an answer, it will largely remain a performative slogan more than a real ideology.

The point of government isn’t just to spend money

It’s election season, so I’m being inundated with election spam on every social media and traditional media I use. I know election posts probably aren’t people’s favorites, but this is the streams of my consciousness and I just wanted to vent.

To start with, some of the twitterati are pulling an absolute masterclass in doublethink. Centrists in the commentariat have been crowing for the last 4 years about how Biden has pumped more oil than any president in history. They’ve been dunking on Republicans about how despite Trump and the GOP’s rhetoric, Biden is more carbon friendly than Trump was.

Now, every words of this is true. I pointed out years ago how despite a small pandemic dip oil production has steadily increased during both Biden and Trump’s presidencies. Biden has inherited a fracking boom, and has not done anything to clamp down on it, so record-setting oil production is to be expected.

But the same commentariat that will crow about Biden’s oil boom will screech in anger and confusion when climate groups like the Sunrise Movement announce they won’t support Biden’s re-election. How can they do that? How can they refuse to support the president who has pumped more oil than any other in history? Gee, maybe because Democrats have said that Climate Change is an existential threat for years, and these folks actually believe it? Seems pretty obvious to me why the Sunrise Movement and other climate groups wouldn’t be happy with Biden’s energy policy.

As a defense, the commetariat likes to point to Biden’s massive spending bills. Billions and billions of dollars are being pumped into the green energy sector, and Democrat columnists are producting hockey-stick graphs comparing Biden’s green spending to previous presidents as proof of his climate success.

The problem with this is that the point of the government isn’t just to spend money. The point of the government is to get results. How much has that billions of dollars actually achieved?

For example, we all know that switching to electric cars is hard when there’s so few charging stations. Biden’s climate bills were supposed to build charging stations across the country to combat this. How many charging stations have Biden’s Billions actually created? As of May this year, just 8. But don’t worry, that number is growing! In March it was just 7! With a rough estimate of 1 charging station every 2 months, can anyone say these billions (trillions!) of dollars are being well spent?

This is exactly the kind of thing that If We Can Put a Man on the Moon… discussed. Politicians are incentivized to declare victory immediately for their re-election campaign. This leads to them touting metrics like “amount of money spent” instead of something actually useful like “miles of track laid” or “amount of actual EV infrastructure.” And since “money spent” is the only metric politicians are focusing on, that money gets spent extremely badly.

Years later, when the money is all spent and the infrastructure is still crumbling, a new campaign will of course arise, saying we now need to spend even *more* money to fix this thing that should have been fixed with the first tranche.

Let me be clear: I believe that climate change is a problem we need to address. But I do not think government spending is the best way to address that. In the last year, Tesla has built around 40 times more EV charging stations than Biden’s infrastructure bill, and they didn’t use taxpayer money to do it.

So why does it *have* to be government spending? I think it’s honestly because a lot of politicians don’t believe that companies can ever accomplish things. When you spend your entire life in government, every problem looks like a taxpayer-funded nail.

The government *can* solve these problems, but it doesn’t need to spend billions to do so. You really want to improve charging infrastructure? Tax gasoline. Tax oil. Tax every step of the refinement process. You will see how quickly consumers shift to electric cars, and how quickly companies spring up to service those electric cars. Hell, a network of gas stations already exists all across the country. If gas was taxed and consumers switched to electric cars, those stations would quickly be forced to switch from offering gas to offering fast electric charging.

You may say that a gas tax would hurt American consumers, but it would hurt them no more than the spending-fueled inflation that America has right now.

Here’s the funniest thing: politicians have adopted the language of the market and claimed that government spending is an investment. We are investing in green energy. But investment expects a return, and if the return on billions of dollars investment is 8 or so EV stations, that isn’t an investment, it’s a ripoff.

Biden chose to keep oil cheap and burn money on 8 EV charging stations. Is it any wonder climate activists don’t appreciate him? When success if measured in dollars spent, then failure is assured.

Energy Return on Energy Investment, a very silly concept

Today I’d like to address one concept that I read about in Richard Heinberg’s The End of Growth, Energy Return on Energy Investment or EROEI. The concept is an attempt to quantify the efficiency of a given energy source, and in the hands of Heinberg and other degrowthers it is a way to “prove” that we are running out of usable energy.

EROEI is a simple and intuitive concept, taking the amount of energy produced by a given source and dividing by the amount of energy it costs to set up and use that source. Oil is a prime example. In the beginning of the 20th century oil extract was easy since it just seeped out of the ground in many places. Drilling a small oil well won’t cost you that much, hell you can probably do it with manpower alone. In that case the oil gushing forth will easily give you a good energy return.

In the 21st century however, things have become harder. Oil wells require powerful machines to drill (which costs energy), and the amount and quality of the oi you get out is often lower. Add to that the fact that modern wells require huge amounts of metal and plastics, all of which cost energy to produce and even more energy to transport to their location, then add the energy it took to find the oil wells in the first place using complex geographical surveys and seismographic data, and taken together some people claim that the EROEI for a modern oil well is already less than 1, meaning that more energy is being put in than the energy we get out.

And oil isn’t the only fuel source heading towards and EROEI of less than 1. Modern mining techniques for coal require bigger and bigger machines, natural gas requires more and more expansive facilities, even solar panels require minerals that are more and more difficult to acquire. It seems everything but hydro power and (perhaps) nuclear power are becoming harder and harder to produce, sending energy returns down further and further.

This phenomenon, where the EROEI for our energy sources is less than 1, is supposed to presage an acute energy crisis and the economic cataclysm that degrowth advocates have been warning us about. If we’re getting out less energy than we’re putting in, then we’re really not even gaining, aren’t we? The problem is, I’m struggling to see how EROEI is even a meaningful way to look at this.

First let me note that not all energy is created equal. Energy in certain forms is more usable to us than in others. A hydroelectric dam holds water which (due to its being elevated above its natural resting place) acts as a store of potential energy. The release of that water drives a turbine to produce electricity. But you can’t fly a plane using water power nor keep it plugged in during flight. Jet fuel is another source of potential energy, and it has a number of advantages versus elevated water. Jet fuel is very easy to use and transport, you can fill a tank with it and move it to wherever your plane is, then fill the plane’s tanks from there.

If the only two energy sources in the world were jet fuel and hydroelectric power, we would still find it beneficial to somehow produce jet fuel using hydroelectric power even though that would necessity an EROEI of less than one. Because although this conversion would have less total energy, the energy would be in a more useful form. People would happily extract oil using hydroelectric power, then run refineries using hydroelectric power, because jet fuel has so much utility. This utility means that (supply being equal), jet fuel would command a higher price than hydroelectric power per unit of energy. And so the economic advantages would make the EROEI disadvantages meaningless.

This is the fatal flaw of EROEI in my mind. The fact that some forms of energy are more useful than others means we can’t directly compare energy out and energy in. The energy that is used to run a modern oil well comes to it from the grid, which is usually powered by coal, solar, wind, or nuclear, none of which can be used to fuel a plane. Converting these forms of energy into oil is an economic gain even if it is an energy loss. Furthermore EROEI estimates are generally overly complex and try to account for every joule of energy used in extraction, even when those calculations don’t really make sense. Let me give you an example:

A neolithic farmer has to plow his own fields, sow his own seeds, reap his own corns. Not only that, but the sun’s rays must shine upon his fields enough to let them grow. Billions of kilocalories of energy are hitting his plants every second, and most of then are lost during the plants’ growth process because photosynthesis is actually not all that efficient to begin with. The plant will have used billions of kilocalories of energy, and from them the farmer gets a few thousands of kilocalories of energy. Most of the energy is lost.

This is the kind of counting EROEI tries to do, applied to farming. When you count up every joule of energy that went into the farmer’s food, you find his food will necessarily provide him with an EROEI of less than one thanks to the first law of thermodynamics. But this isn’t a problem because Earth isn’t a closed system, nor are our oil wells. We are blasted by sunlight every minute, our core produces energy from decaying nucleotides, our tides are driven in part by the moon’s gravity, there is so much energy hitting us that we could fuel the entire world for a thousand years and never run out. The problem is that there are some scenarios where that energy isn’t useful. You can’t fly a plane with solar or geothermal or gravitational energy, but you can power an oil well. So we happily use the energies we have lots of (including our use of solar power to grow useful plants and animals!) and use that energy to help us extract the energies with greater utility.

I think EROEI failed from the very beginning for this very reason. It ignores economic realities and the massive amount of energy that surrounds us, and instead argues from the first law of thermodynamics. Yes in any closed system energy eventually runs out, but it isn’t even clear that our universe is a closed system, and the earth definitely is not, so we need to face up to economic reality on this.