Hillary’s Hot Air Balloon [Updated]

I’m starting to think Hillary Clinton believes her own B.S., or represents the first attempt at a human self-inflated hot air balloon.  Back in the 1960s, Great Society liberals told us that they’d abolish poverty in 10 years (Sargent Shriver declared this confidently in Capitol Hill testimony). Yeah—how’d that work out for them?

Having learned nothing from that kind of grandiosity, Hillary Clinton todaypledged to take steps as president to ensure that within a decade, the U.S. will produce enough clean, renewable energy to power every home in the country. And she set a target of half a billion solar panels installed in the U.S. by the end of her first term.”

This is energy illiteracy of the first order. There’s a long history of energy transitions in advanced industrial nations (the best work on this coming from Vaclav Smil, a left-leaning Canadian whom I once heard call Al Gore’s energy views “embarrassing”), always involving new energy sources that were cheaper and more abundant than those they displaced (think kerosene over whale oil, as a simple example). There is no example of an energy transition of this scale on this time line.

Time to cue Jon Stewart on previous promises of rapid energy transitions. (Yes, I know: in Stewart’s current “Turn It Up to 11 Against the GOP” farewell tour, he won’t turn his ire on Hillary’s silliness. But this one’s in the record.)

UPDATE by JOHN: Readers who rely on the Associated Press will get no hint that Hillary’s “plan” is delusional: its laudatory article is headlined Clinton Aims High In Green Energy Plan. The AP’s only concern is that Hillary might not go far enough; she still won’t commit herself on the Keystone Pipeline.

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