Germany may need to — er — “adjust” its own clean-energy standards
Le sigh. Yet again, we’re presented with another demonstration of what happens when a government tries to engineer the society it wants based on the current regime’s political ambitions, rather than what is practically and fiscally possible. Is it really a good idea to just unilaterally decide that your country is going to overhaul its energy sector, just because you wish it to be so — the costs be damned? And besides spending unsustainable amounts of money on government programs to support the renewable ventures of its political favor, a perhaps greater concern is that the energy/science/tech industries are busy rent-seeking and chasing subsidies rather than a free-market profit. Government interference distorts market signals and displaces resources — what if they’re potentially wasting their time and resources on ideas that may not be worth a hill of beans while they could be researching and developing new alternatives that really could stand a shot? If this keeps up, perhaps we’ll never know.
Read the whole thing.
