Friday, February 24, 2012

At Least With Tulips You Got A Pretty Flower

... with EnviroMania, you just get shuttered heavy industry sites and high electricity prices. The whole article is worth a read, and I mean really worth a read, but here's a tiny tidbit.
In macroeconomic terms, the impending demise of heavy industry is all the more worrying, because the job losses will not be offset elsewhere. There is no sign yet of the green economic miracle that the federal government promised would accompany Germany's new energy strategy. On the contrary, many manufacturers of wind turbines and solar panels complain that business is bad and are cutting jobs. Some solar companies have already gone out of business. The environmental sector faces a number of problems, especially -- and ironically -- those stemming from high energy prices.
Buying tulips for insane prices was obviously a fool's game. Shutting down your nukes, regulating fossil fuel plants into bankruptcy and relying on wind and solar to power the grid is, too.

Wind power and tulips! It's the daily double!

Image credit: The Recumbent Blog.

3 comments:

ligneus said...

I've been trying to send you a link to this story.

K T Cat said...

Thanks for the link! I had no idea Keynes was so instrumental in Breton Woods. Sounds like one of his standard "solve the problem for us and screw the next generation" kinds of solutions.

ligneus said...

This is from Forbes.

Just a little reminder that there’s more agreement about the value of Hayek’s book, The Road to Serfdom, than is often appreciated.

John Maynard Keynes, thought to be the absolute opposite to Hayek in political and economic outlook, really rather liked the book:

In my opinion it is a grand book … Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.

There is of course something of a literature which goes on to describe how their views do differ (which I would boil down to, if I were to be very unkind indeed, to Keynes thinking he was clever enough to be able to do the planning required in his economics and Hayek being wise enough to know that no one was that clever) but it is worth noting I think that there isn’t the philosophic canyon between the two that some moderns seem to think there is.

A gap, certainly, but not a canyon.

Interesting eh?