This post is sure to irritate people: Now and then, I check up on what Robert Bryce is writing, and the energy journalist has recently published “Five Myths About Green Energy” in The Washington Post. The “myths”:
1. Solar and wind power are the greenest of them all.
2. Going green will reduce our dependence on imports from unsavory regimes.
3. A green American economy will create green American jobs.
4. Electric cars will substantially reduce demand for oil.
5. The United States lags behind other rich countries in going green.
You’ll have to read the article to find out why Mr. Bryce labels these as myths. Or you could read his latest book — Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future — which seems to be the source of the article.
Mr. Bryce is the managing editor of Energy Tribune and he positions himself as something of a contrarian to popular views on energy issues. This can make some of his work enlightening — like a bucket of cold water thrown on hype about green energy, energy independence, and so on. The rosy energy outlooks of Amory Lovins and Tom Friedman are among his frequent targets (although Mr. Bryce is hardly alone in criticizing them), and he wrote a whole book about the myth of “energy independence” that is so often promoted by politicians. He is a realist on coal use — I particularly liked his assessment of technology’s impact on electricity usage in an article called “Dig More Coal. The iPad is Coming.”
However, Mr. Bryce — as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a congregant of the Church of the Free Market, and an agnostic on climate change – also publishes stuff that seems to defy sensible principles for long-term planning, and he questions our ability as a society to make decisions about our future apart from market forces.
For example, he seems to waffle on major questions about how to address our looming problems with oil supply. On John Stossel’s Fox News show, Mr. Bryce debated T. Boone Pickens about energy independence. When Mr. Pickens raised questions about our supply of oil and pressed Mr. Bryce on what might replace that vital energy source in the future, Mr. Bryce sounded like the rosy optimists he so often skewers. “Well, when oil becomes too expensive, we’ll move to something that is cleaner, cheaper, more abundant, or all of the above,” he said.
He seems to be inconsistent in that view. “No other substance can compare to oil in terms of energy density, flexibility, cost and convenience,” he said in a recent op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. Regarding the run-up in oil prices in 2008, Mr. Bryce said that he had been wrong — that it was not supply and demand that drove up prices, as he had written earlier, but speculation. Later, he noted that American automobile drivers were staying home, which may mean that the prices were subject to demand after all. He has been skeptical of the doom-and-gloom vision of peak oil, then worried about it, then back on the cheerleading team for unbridled oil use. (“The world isn’t using too much oil. It’s not using enough,” he says in that Wall Street Journal op-ed.)
Certainly, his latest piece on the “five myths” has gotten people’s blood pressure up. Various sites — like this one and this one — have started taking on Mr. Bryce’s arguments and picking them apart. Nevertheless, Mr. Bryce is certainly provocative and worth reading — even if you’re just trying to get another perspective.
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