What's going on here?

Doug Casey: Solar and wind energy can be useful. But generally only for special applications or remote locations where regular power is uneconomic or unavailable.

Wind and solar make no sense for mass power generation, however. They're completely unsuitable for a complex industrial civilization. The Greens aren't trying to solve a technological problem but make an ideological statement. Which is fine, except they're doing it at the public's expense. Meanwhile, the public has been so propagandized that they now feel it's morally righteous to be hornswoggled.

No problem if someone feels that covering his rooftop with solar panels can cut his electricity bill and pay back the cost in 7 or 10 years—which is roughly the case today. It's something else entirely if a government puts a society's electrical grid at risk in order to virtue signal.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for alternative methods of generating energy. Geothermal can work in places like Iceland, where near-surface magma hotspots currently generate around 30% of their electricity. Tidal power works in certain locations. As does hydro, although it's increasingly unpopular because dams inundate a lot of land, silt up, displace the locals, destroy existing fauna and flora, and eventually collapse.

It's a fact solar tech has been improving for decades. For instance, there's been an annual 3000KM race across Australia for solar cars since 1987. They're still basically experimental toys, but they get faster every year. Still, it's only possible in a place like the Australian desert where the sun is usable 12 hours a day, every day. Any kid who's played in the sun with a magnifying glass can tell you solar power is real—but that doesn't mean that it's suitable for base-load power in an industrial civilization. Someday we may use gigantic collectors in high earth orbit to capture the sun's power and beam it down to earth by microwave. But that's for the future.

So-called "green" technologies will continue developing and getting cheaper. Excellent. But progress will be much faster if entrepreneurs make the necessary decisions for economic reasons rather than bureaucrats for political reasons.