Pete Du Pont explains in The Wall Street Journal that human ingenuity will beat defeatism from the left, including President Obama who tries to scare Americans with dire energy prophesies.
While fossil fuels will be our primary energy sources for several decades, we need progress in renewables so they can eventually supplant today’s fossil fuels. Again, we see good news. Look at just one recent issue of Popular Science, where we see more-efficient solar and wind technology and a possible nonbattery alternative for the energy storage critical for such renewables. Other promising technologies include energy from waste, fueling nuclear plants with spent nuclear fuel (instead of having to store such waste), using heat generated from industrial processes to create electricity, and drawing energy from waves and tidal movements.
All of which means the talk in recent decades about energy shortages will again be proved wrong, as all such Malthusian predictions have. Such defeatism misses the mark because it fails to account for the incredible impact of human ingenuity and man’s unceasing search for something better. In short, we can see an incredibly bright energy future on the horizon.
