Pumping Up Heating Pumps (Or It’s Diesel All Over Again)
In the 1984 classic “Ghostbusters,” Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz envisions the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man when tasked with choosing the “form of the destructor.” As he stands atop a high-rise, watching a 100-foot marshmallow wreak havoc on the city below, he rationalizes, “I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something that could never ever possibly destroy us.” Similarly, politicians are at it again, picking supposed winners in the name of fighting climate change.
Carey Smith | Founding Contrarian
On a daily basis, politicians and their bureaucratic machines pick winners and losers among American and foreign businesses, choosing how to spend more than $10 trillion annually. Government support can prop up entirely undeserving industries, injecting millions into technologies that promise radical improvements but fail to deliver.
In the latest example of picking winners among losers, the Biden administration touted $9 billion in funding to make our homes more efficient by installing up to 500,000 heat pumps.
Heat pumps are great if you live in Florida or Texas — but not so good if you live in New York, Michigan or anywhere else the mercury dips severely in winter. Heat pumps pull heat indoors from the outside, and you don’t have to be an accomplished engineer to understand there’s not much heat to harvest in the middle of winter in New Hampshire. Their efficiency declines when temperatures dip below the mid-40s, along with your comfort.
But politicians have glommed onto them in the race to power everything with electricity instead of other available types of energy, including natural gas of which America has an abundance due to advances in fracking technology. California has outlawed the sale of new gas-powered furnaces and water heaters beginning in 2030. And in some cities, neighborhoods under construction don’t have natural gas service at all, leaving electricity as the only heat source.
Biden isn’t the only politician to hop aboard the train to Chillsville. The Brits had just gone through this before Boris Johnson gave way to a successor who was famously outlasted by a wilting head of lettuce. Boris asked everyone to trade in their gas boilers for heat pumps that can cost as much as a Brit’s annual salary, as if that’s even a realistic proposition.
These are the same politicians also pushing wood pellets as a source of green energy, despite critics pointing out that burning wood for energy creates at least as much pollution as burning coal. So why the big push? Critics point to politics, specifically people with “close ties to industry” who “work to advantage the interests of the forest industry,” according to a BBC report.
Our politicians may be starry-eyed over heat pumps now, but someday, perhaps a few decades from now, the scam will be revealed, much like the great rise and fall of diesel vehicles in Europe. Beginning in the 1990s, European leaders pushed diesel as a more efficient fuel source, and ownership skyrocketed. But it turns out there was a flaw in their logic — actually, multiple flaws. If you live on this planet and are over the age of 6, you know that diesel cars and trucks produce a lot of soot. That soot is filled with toxic air pollutants, worsening the climate issues that The Guardian plasters on its front page near daily.
In the end, the great gospel of diesel really didn’t do much of anything to slow global warming, and in fact, it made things worse in unexpected ways
It’s like Ray from “Ghostbusters” in creating the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. The solution became the problem for poor Ray, just like these hairbrained hacks for global warming. You have to wonder — where do our politicians even get the ideas they’re peddling? It’s a solid bet you should just look for the lobbyists with their hands in the till. Crony capitalism reigns, and we’re the ones left out in the cold.