Why does the Wall Street Journal fear economic change? If old, dirty power plants are obsolete, let ‘em die.
Posted by Dick Munson on September 23rd, 2009
Sean Casten’s new Grist blog challenges Steven Hayward’s op-ed in a Wall Street Journal. According to Sean:
Hayward and the Journal seem to fear economic change. Power plants, he argues, are long-lasting assets, “so a rapid switch to new technology will mean retiring assets before their useful life is over and diverting trillions in capital from other sectors.” Yet do Hayward and the Journal lament the music-box factories made obsolescent by Steve Jobs’ tinkering? According to Casten: If old, dirty power plants are obsolete, “let ‘em die. That’s how markets work. And if they’ve been allowed to forestall obsolescence simply because they got a free pass on their environmental impacts … well then markets weren’t allowed to work.”
Sean also challenges Hayward’s assumption that you can’t reduce emissions without producing less energy. Such a claim, says Sean, “requires the ratio of energy-in/energy-out to be forever fixed. Says who? Have we reached such degrees of societal perfection that we will never be able to increase our energy efficiency? If so, someone please arrest the entire population of Denmark for so consistently and egregiously violating the laws of thermodynamics (they currently consume about half the fossil fuel of the U.S. per dollar of GDP).”
The fact that emissions can be reduced while producing more energy is not a radical idea. Yet as Sean points by simply producing energy more efficiently the U.S. would be able to reduce emissions and get more energy out of the same fuel inputs.