We pundits and writers are often torn, when we feel a need to comment on the political aspects of a crisis or disaster.
On the one hand, there are real public policy issues underlying the handling of the crisis, issues that merit study and introspection. On the other hand, with public focus on the crisis, it’s natural to want to concentrate on putting out the fire, rebuilding the roads, saving the stranded, feeding the homeless, and “saving the politics for later.”
We may not feel it’s right, we may not feel it’s the time, to say “I told you so,” while people are suffering. It’s human nature to put short-term compassion ahead of long-term solutions, even when you know in the moment what’s really needed.
But from a public policy perspective, that’s often the most effective time to address these issues. The horrible destruction wrought by Hurricane Helene is a perfect, tragic example, and it is front-of-mind right now.
Even those of us fortunate enough to be far away have seen the photos and videos on the news and on the internet. Roads washed away, houses destroyed, communities flooded. It’s the kind of storm that reminds us why we have building codes, why we bury power cables in some regions and raise them on telephone poles in others, why we require certain kinds of structures to be built with certain types and densities of materials.
The biggest forced change to our society since the internet – the government-forced change in electrical power – is the giant elephant in the room here.
As Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc across the southeast and midatlantic states, it reminded us of the unbridled destruction that Mother Nature is capable of causing – and simultaneously, it stood as a reminder of the importance of considering Mother Nature when we select our power sources.
For the past 15 years – roughly since the 2008 election of Barack Obama and Joe Biden – the executive branch (with a brief respite during President Trump’s first term) has been nudging, pushing, cajoling, and outright forcing our country to switch from traditional power plants to new, “renewable” energy based on wind and solar power.
Now, wind and solar could never pay for themselves without subsidies, so the federal government has loaded up the marketplace with subsidies of all kinds and at all points in the process – subsidies for the manufacturers, land royalties, more subsidies for the installers, even more subsidies for the final users. Countless federal, state and local deals and encouragements – all separate so that it’s impossible for anyone to ever add up the total percentage of the cost of these things, and fully appreciate just how much pressure the Leviathan’s thumb has put on the scale to make wind turbines and solar panels look like a cost-effective option.
We opponents all talk about the massive acreage of beachfront or seashore or farmland that’s wasted by the installation of windmills. We all talk about the preposterous waste of space when whole rural areas are taken out of agriculture to install solar farms. We talk about the long-term unsustainability of disposing of these massive unrecyclable eyesores when they finally need to be retired (which is usually about halfway through the lifespan originally promised).
But do we talk enough about the outrageous, unforgivable fragility of this technology in the face of the violence of Mother Nature?
A week after the hurricane, nuclear, coal, oil and natural gas power plants are still operating. Such buildings are huge, sturdy, and as weatherproof as you can get.
Where the electric grid is dependent on traditional energy sources, the grid still functions, and as power lines are repaired, the power flows. Countless miles of wires were knocked down in the storm; you have to repair and replace those wires, which takes time. But it’s manageable, and since the power itself is still being created, once those cables are replaced, a region has power again.
By contrast, solar panels and windmills are exposed to the elements. They are all outdoors, by definition, and are remarkably fragile. Solar panels and windmills not only aren’t, but cannot be, safely protected inside well-built, solid structures, like traditional power plants.
You still need to replace those power cables, of course, either way. But when your region depends on windmill farms and solar farms for the power that runs through those wires, the problems are compounded.
Solar panels are almost always shattered by tornadoes, crushed by falling trees, buried in mudslides. They can’t survive simple hailstorms, let alone hurricanes.
If a roof collapses or a barn floats away, the flimsy plastic panels on that roof won’t survive either.
Wind turbine blades are snapped by high winds, broken by flying projectiles. They take months to repair, if ever.
Frequently, once a blade is broken, the entire million-dollar structure must be retired. And with acres of concrete permanently seated below each windmill, it will never even be cost-effective to return that land to its once-worthwhile prior use as farmland or a residential or commercial site.
Even solar panels, which are so flimsy as to be practically portable, cause a severe challenge when ruined. They are typically mounted on the roofs of houses, garages, barns, freight terminals and office buildings. The replacement of shingles after a storm should be easy and relatively inexpensive, but not once solar panels have been installed above the roof. With thousands of fresh holes from the installation of the panels added to the roof, by definition compromising the effectiveness of the shingles, any rebuilding after such a disaster becomes a much bigger job, more expensive and more complicated, even when only one of the two “needed” to be replaced.
If you’re insured, that’s bad enough. You have a deductible, and you lose time, energy and utility while the work goes on, even if you will eventually get reimbursed.
And if you’re uninsured, that’s even worse; the choice to include a windmill or solar panel system on your property has added that much more cost and trouble to the rebuilding project, making your uninsured losses on the property that much more severe.
And what of vehicles? Which cars and trucks still work, and which ones are grounded after a storm?
Vehicles that weren’t damaged by the storm – if powered by gasoline and diesel fuel – can still be refilled and continue to operate, good as new. The internal combustion engine is remarkably resilient.
By contrast, electric vehicles are useless until they can be recharged. When there’s no power for miles, you can’t just carry a red gallon jug of electricity back from the nearest station. EVs must wait days or weeks – even months – until there’s power again to recharge their batteries.
And while nobody in the industry likes to admit it, if an EV is caught in a severe rainstorm, its battery can become a spontaneous combustion risk all on their own – and sometimes you don’t know for days or weeks if there was enough rain to compromise the battery. When EVs are involved in minor auto crashes, they are often totaled out because even minor damage can compromise the battery. How much more of a risk that when projectiles are flying around for days during a hurricane, sometime high in the air but often low to the ground, directly in the path of such batteries.
Now, Hurricane Helene was a horrible hurricane the most destructive in decades.
But one of the few good things about it is that it happened early enough in our ongoing national transition from sensible energy sources to stupid energy sources.
Imagine if 50% of the energy in the affected region was produced by now-shattered windmills and plastic solar panels. Imagine if 50% of the cars, trucks, and buses were EVs. You think this devastation is bad now? Imagine how bad it would be then.
And imagine if the transition were complete. The modern American Left – that is, the party of Obama, Biden, Harris and Walz – calls for an end to nuclear power, an end to natural gas, and an end to coal and oil as sources of power for our electric grid. They call for an end to the internal combustion engine and the diesel engine.
These aren’t mild campaign statements to retain the support of their craziest fringe supporters; these are platform commitments that drive the policies they pursue when they hold office. Today’s Democrats have implemented regulatory changes on the federal level, with supporting changes in blue states as well, that cause otherwise sane states to install insane solar and wind farms, and that cause otherwise sane auto manufacturers to stop making vehicles that work and to instead manufacture vehicles that are doomed to fail.
Every additional degree of switching from traditional, rational energy to new, irrational energy increases the total cost of rebuilding, increases the duration of human suffering, and increases the total financial loss of the victims of natural disasters like this.
Hurricane Helene gives us a chance to see the choices before us, clear as crystal. It gives us an opportunity to catch ourselves, and put a full stop to this imbecilic switch to wind and solar, as fast as we can.
We must make America a world leader in energy production and efficiency again, as we were just a few short years ago.
We must return America to its our traditional reliance on energy that works. Before it’s too late.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.
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