Please, No Operation Warp Speed for Green Energy

There is no vaccine, moonshot or atom bomb for alternative energy

Letter to The WSJ.

"Choose any dramatic government-sponsored technical program—the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Program and so forth—and people will want to apply it to alternative “green” energy: In “What Global Warming Has in Common With Covid,” (op-ed, April 13), Tomas Philipson writes, “The Biden administration needs an Operation Warp Speed for green-energy alternatives.”

I am sympathetic to some of Mr. Philipson’s ideas: spurring private innovation and removing regulatory barriers. But the problems of an energy transition are at most superficially like those of Covid, and the differences are vast.

Green energy is nothing new. Government has provided incentives for wind and solar since the 1970s; the problems that remain are inherent, not entirely remediable. So, too, electric vehicles. Entrepreneurs and government officials have been after mass battery storage for decades, with lots of money spent and limited success.

Unlike doses of vaccines, wind turbines, super batteries and so forth require so much in the way of scarce minerals that vast development would pose national security concerns.

Unlike the production and distribution of pills, replacing over 3,000 fossil-fuel power plants and millions of internal-combustion vehicles would require thousands of new factories, and cost trillions of dollars. It also will take at least a few generations.

Put simply, there is no vaccine, moonshot or atom bomb for alternative energy. We should stop thinking in those terms and approach energy and climate policy modestly: doing R&D (some of it subsidized) and moving not at warp speed, but cautiously, given that “green” energy has environmental and health impacts. Whatever we start will have some negative consequences. We’ll need time to decide if the benefits are large enough to continue.

Em. Prof. Peter Z. Grossman

Butler University

Indianapolis"