While we heard great things about the state’s energy efficiency program, we didn’t hear how much the program costs consumers–so i helped out with some testimony. Since 2002, Texas consumers have paid $591.1 million to support the state’s energy efficiency program, and the program’s estimated cost for 2010 is $114.8 million. A recent increase to the program by the Public Utility Commission of Texas will probably double these costs. And legislative proposals could increase the annual cost to over $500 million.

All of this would be okay, of course, if the state’s energy efficiency program saved consumers money through reduced consumption of electricity. However, there is simply no way to properly determine the efficiency of the state’s energy efficiency program. But an educated guess is that it costs more than it saves.

This same flaw also plagues the state’s subsidies of renewable energy through the renewable portfolio standard, CREZ lines, and tax breaks. Several people testifying today were asking the legislature to give them subsidies for technologies like solar, biomass, and geothermal. But Sen. Chris Harris captured the problem with these subsidies when he asked, “How can I justify going to my constituents and tell them that I voted to give you money?” Sen. Mike Jackson also pointed out that solar projects are much like wind projects in that we give them credits for economic development but after the installation there are very few jobs left. Renewable energy generation simply costs more than generation from conventional sources.

The results of these two green programs stand in stark contrast to the history of energy use. Market-based energy efficiency has for centuries made electricity less expensive to use so that we could use more of it. This makes sense because there is almost a one on one correlation between the increased wealth and health of society and the increased use of energy.

In the last four weeks Texas has set four new records of peak electricity demand, i.e., we’ve used more electricity recently than ever before. But rather than fret about this and create more government programs, we should receive this as good news that clearly shows that the market can handle the increased demand for electricity in the state. It also shows that what Texans want is more, less expensive electricity, not less, more expensive electricity.

If Texas wants to reduce energy costs and save money for Texas consumers, it needs to go back to the drawing board and make significant changes to the energy efficiency program and eliminate the Renewable Portfolio Standard.

“What I want to do today is to talk about the new thinking and the new approach that President Obama brings to the task of safeguarding the American people from violent extremism and terrorism.”

“The president understands that military power, intelligence operations and law enforcement alone will never solve the second long-term challenge we face – the threat of violent extremism generally, including the political, economic and social factors that help put so many individuals on the path to violence. … Extremist violence and terrorist attacks are therefore, often the final, murderous manifestations of a long process rooted in helplessness, humiliation and hatred. … This is why the president’s approach includes a critical fourth element – the recognition that addressing these upstream factors is ultimately not a military operation, but a political, economic and social campaign to meet the basic needs and legitimate grievances of ordinary people.”

“As many have noted, the president does not describe this as a “war on terrorism.” That is because terrorism is but a tactic – a means to an end – which, in al-Qaida’s case, is global domination by an Islamic caliphate. … Likewise, the president does not describe this as a “global war.” …  Nor does President Obama see this challenge as a fight against jihadists. Describing terrorists in this way, using the legitimate term “jihad,” which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve.”

“President Obama has made it clear that the United States will not be defined simply by what we are against, but by what we are for … Rather than looking at allies and other nations through the narrow prism of terrorism, whether they are with us or against us, the administration is now engaging other countries and people across a broader range of areas.”

“At the same time, terrorism is recognized as one of the many transnational challenges the world will face in the 21st century. We saw this in [the president’s] speech in Cairo, where he spoke of a broader engagement with the world’s Muslims, including the issues important to them – education, public health, economic development, responsive governance and women’s rights. Indeed, it was telling that the president was actually criticized in certain quarters in this country for not using words like terror, terrorist and terrorism in that speech. This goes to the heart of this new approach. Why should a great and powerful nation like the United States allow its relationship with more than a billion Muslims around the world be defined by the narrow hatred and nihilistic actions of an exceptionally small minority of Muslims?”

Yet that is exactly what it does in an article by Ramesh Ponnuru, “Contractual Obligations,” that discusses the need for a new “Contract for America.”

Is it because, as Mr. Ponnuru points out, people worry about global warming? Well, people worry about not being able to pay their mortgages, but that doesn’t mean we should support massive government bailouts. Except that NR supported the Bush bailout plan as well.

These and other positions have me worried about NR. In this case, because even if one buys into the dubious claims of anthropomorphic global warming, government promotion of new energy technologies has proved itself every bit the failure that the bailout plan turned out to be. Remember Jimmy Carter’s failed Synfuels Corporation? It was child’s play compared to the billions of dollars that are being wasted on ethanol, wind, solar, and biomass today–billions of dollars that are making people poorer and making energy more expensive. The history of energy use is the history of energy becoming less expensive. Yet NR is supporting a policy making energy more expensive.

If it is because the editors are worried about man-made global warming and believe that government-led fuels policy will make a difference, they are simply wrong. If it is because they are worried that without such a policy in a new Contract Republicans won’t take back the House, then they are heading down the same wrong-minded path as George W. Bush who believed that policies such as steel tariffs and drug benefits for seniors would maintain a Republican majority.

A new Contract won’t work if it is designed primarily to elect Republicans. Or if it promotes more government involvement in our lives. Americans don’t want the government telling them what kind of cars to drive any more than they want it telling them what doctor they have to see.

As Chris Edwards, Cato’s director of tax policy, rather depressingly puts it, “There is a federal subsidy program for every year that has passed since Emperor Augustus held sway in Rome. We’ve gone from bread and circuses to food stamps, the National Endowment for the Arts, and 1,999 other hand-out programs from the imperial city on the Potomac.”

Of course, Washington isn’t alone in the subsidy game. Texas does pretty well too. In addition to the standard economic development programs, Texas is tops in the nation when it comes to renewable energy subsidies. By 2020, Texas consumers could be paying as much $1.3 billion a year to support wind energy—that is in addition to the $300 million or so the Feds are contributing to Texas wind producers. The solar folks are also lining up—the cost of proposed solar subsidies last session ran as high as $220 million. And they’ll all be back in 2011.

It would be nice in this one instance if we could topple Texas from its number one ranking.

As I grew older, I stopped reading National Geographic for about 15 to 20 years from somewhere in the mid-70s to the 90s. I still valued it at some level because I kept on changing my address as I moved. But spent very little time reading each issue, if at all. When I did finally start reading it again, I noticed it had changed. It was no longer a magazine about nature. It was a magazine with an agenda of proving to the world that God does not exist. Of course, it doesn’t say that out loud. Instead, it uses evolution as its proxy in its propaganda efforts by attempting to prove that every act of creation that Christianity might attribute to God was instead brought about by happenstance. See the 2004 article, “Was Darwin Wrong?” In case you are wondering, their answer is, “No. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming.”

I noticed this again in an article, Worlds Apart, in the most recent issue.

The article is about the search for “exoplanets,” i.e., planets that orbit stars other than our sun. To date, we are told, more than 370 exoplanets have been “identified.” Not actually observed, of course, because they are too small and far away to be seen, but assumed to exist by inference through such data as gravitational disruptions and dimming of a star’s brightness. I’ll comment on what I think about these discoveries in another post.

Not being able to leave us in marveling at the possibility of other life-supporting planets, National Geographic had to finish the article by carrying on its jihad against God. It starts with the proclamation that “we now have reason to believe that billions of such planets must exist and that they hold the promise of expanding not only the scope of human knowledge but also the richness of the human imagination.” So far so good, because in fact a growing knowledge of space does tend to bring richness to the human imagination—that is why I liked the magazine as a kid!

But the article finishes with this:

For thousands of years we humans knew so little about the universe that we were apt to celebrate our imaginations and denigrate reality. (As Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote, the mysticism of the religious visionaries of old arose from an “intolerable disparity between the hugeness of their desire and the smallness of reality.”) Now, with advances in science, it has become gallingly evident that nature’s creativity outstrips our own.

God, it seems, is a figment of the imagination of people not satisfied with the smallness of reality. However, with the scientific advances and growing knowledge of the universe over the last few centuries, God is becoming an artifact soon to be swept away into the dustbin of history. As the largeness of reality outstrips even our wild imaginations, we won’t need Him anymore.

I must confess here that I also changed over the 15 to 20 years that I didn’t read National Geographic. So I am quite sure that in the 1970s that I wouldn’t have understood what they meant by “nature’s creativity” much less objected to it. For my knowledge of who God is was even more limited then than it is today. So it could be that National Geographic hasn’t changed so much as I have.

Yet I don’t think this is entirely what happened. There was something about the 1980s that seemed to change just about everyone. It’s not that there hasn’t been a harshness in the national dialogue from a historical perspective—a look at the 1780s or the 1880s would dispel that notion. And there was certainly Watergate as a more recent example. But the division in the country did seem to grow significantly during the 1980s. My own thought is that the Left thought they had won the war after Watergate and didn’t really have to pay attention to conservatives or Christians. However, the 1980s brought on Ronald Reagan, a mainstream National Review, the Heritage Foundation and an unimagined—by the left—political ascendancy of the conservative movement that taught them otherwise. The political left all of a sudden felt its very survival was as stake. Thus was reborn the vitriol that characterizes many of the attacks on conservative principles and the Christian worldview today (of course, liberals are not the only ones guilty of leveling vitriol at opponents, but that is a topic for another day).

For what it is worth, that’s my take on it. But whatever the case, I am still trying to figure out what to do with my National Geographic subscription. William (son-age 6) can’t comprehend its atheistic propaganda—yet, but loves to look at the pictures and there will come a time that I have to do more screening of it. It may well be an educational opportunity to help him learn about other viewpoints and how to deal with them. But it might also be a lost cause. If that is the case, so be it, although I’d hate to give up the next 30 years or so (Lord willing) of my pre-paid lifetime subscription.

“The Little House Books are stories of long ago. Today our way of living and our schools are much different; so many things have made living and learning easier. But the real things haven’t changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures and to be cheerful and have courage when things go wrong. Great improvements in living have been made because every American has always been free to pursue his happiness, and so long as Americans are free they will continue to make our country ever more wonderful.” – Laura Ingalls Wilder

Of course, the greatest freedom for which we should be grateful is the freedom from sin we have in Christ.

Happy Thanksgiving

I remember consistently paying $3,000 for a new computer from Tandy (my first one, with an 8086 processor purchased in 1986) and then Gateway until about 1995-6, when the price started dropping. My first Tandy computer did not have a hard drive, and everything ran off of two floppies. Then about a year later, I was able to buy a 15 MB hard card and at that point was able to start loading some programs and saving files on the computer hard drive, instead of running/saving everything off of a floppy.

I skipped the 80286 processor, and bought my next computer with an 80386 processor in 1990, again for about $3,000, then repeated the process again around 1993 at the same price. But finally prices started coming down at the next purchase.

I thought it was great! And it was. The problem was …

The problem was I loved Gateway because they made the best computers for the best price in the business, and owned some stock. What I didn’t realize was that the price drop was the beginning of computers becoming commodities and the beginning of the restructuring of the computer industry. Of course, most other folks didn’t realize it either, but that was little consolation as I saw my Gateway stock plummet.

Change is hard, because while many people benefit from change, others suffer. Yet that is the price of innovation, or creative destruction as it is sometimes called in economics. New jobs in the refrigerator industry mean that old jobs in the ice making industry go away.

There are two ways that society can handle innovation.

One is to try to stop it. Government can step in and regulate the new jobs while subsidizing the old jobs. But this is only a forced transfer of wealth from one group to another that also stops the creation of new wealth that everyone can share in. Imagine a world today without modern refrigeration where we were all waiting for the ice man to show up before the pot roast went bad.

The other way is for individuals to adapt. To learn new skills, find new jobs, take new directions. And when that doesn’t work as smoothly as we’d all like it to, then other individuals must step in to help. It is called charity, a concept in great danger today. Because there is no charity in government welfare, even when we call it compassionate conservatism.

Welfare is the violent, anonymous transfer of wealth from one individual to another. There is no charity, no love, and no accountability. People are allowed, even encouraged, to live in the past and thus continue on in suffering. In fact, those in government have a stake in continuing the suffering, lest their jobs disappear as well. Little is accomplished, but many are harmed.

On the other hand, charity is the voluntary and personal giving of oneself to another in the form of time, money, and spirit. And because of this, it is the most effective means of helping others make the transitions required by innovation. Change may be painful, but as individual strength and charity take it on, the pain becomes tolerable and more often than not short-lived.

Innovation is why we have $500 computers today. Charity is why most of the old abacus workers made the transition to the computer age. Government regulation and welfare are why we don’t have $50 computers and why some of the abacus workers are still unemployed.