OH YEAH?

When the media trumpet the energy wisdom by biologist Commoner, guitarist Komanoff, lawyer Freeman, dropout Lovins, and lobbyist Nader, you get a pile of dung that spells Ignorance Is Power. The amazing aspect is not the mentality of the perpetrators (who, after all, make a good living with their "trade"), but the vast amount of brainless parrots who will repeat their gibberish.

Some of it is unanswerable because, as Samuel Johnson said, you cannot argue with unmitigated imbecility. Why heat water to steam at a power plant only to boil a kettle of water with the produced electricity? (Why drive cars along one side of the freeway only to have cars driving in the opposite direction on the other?)

Other statements can be recognized as meaningful because they are false. Yes, there is an overcapacity of electric power now, but mainly due to the recession; also because spare capacity (some 20%) is needed for scheduled maintenance, forced outages, and unforeseen load increases. Yes, electric power generation is only about 33% efficient; but how efficient would the fuel be if you transported it to where it is needed and used it for anything but raw heat? Less than 20% for combustion engines, for example.

Such facts and figures remain without effect on the parrots, for they repeat not the better logic, but the bigger noise.

Then there are the curves of historical experience. Is electricity an energy waster or saver? As high energy prices forced conservation and the slowing or even stopping of energy consumption, was wasteful electricity replaced by the other fuels, or did electricity, the energy saver, take over from them?

And here is another splendid confirmation of such wisdom, this one for West German industrial energy consumption since 1960 (=100), taken from Stromverbrauchsentwicklung und Kraftwerksplanung by G. Hecker (IZE, Bonn, 1983): You see the fuels increasing at the expense of electricity? You can't? You will, you will! Just close your eyes and say your mantra...