I have no idea why Business Insider's tech department decided to re-up a video highlight stream of a "solar-powered sea vessel" on their Twitter feed recently. The original video came with the 2018 launch of the MS Tûranor PlanetSolar craft that Business Insider detailed here:
Again, the solar-powered catamaran was making headlines three years ago, so why the financial and business news website decided to start talking about it again is a mystery. But whatever the reason, I'm glad they did, since the floating solar panels reveal all that is wrong with the current state of the renewable energy craze.
Consider what we're looking at in this video. A spectacularly expensive vessel that despite its unique appearance, offers virtually no tangible benefits in the modern world. Storage space is non-existent, hauling anything of substance is out of the question, lounging on the deck is obviously impossible, and top speeds are roughly equivalent to the last vessels we built to run on a different renewable energy back in the 17th century:
This is the perfect encapsulation of what boondoggles like the so-called Green New Deal offer us: 17th century comforts at 21st century costs.
Oddly enough, though disagreeing with their politics, I've always appreciated the unintentional honesty of these green advocates in naming their policy agenda after the greatest unforced error in American economic history. FDR's New Deal failed dramatically in curbing the calamities of the Great Depression. Roosevelt's own Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau admitted as much a full eight years into the Democrat's 12-year White House tenure:
"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot!"
He wasn't wrong. After eight years of New Deal programs to treat the Depression, unemployment had risen almost a full point from 16.3% in 1931 to 17.2% in 1939. It's now convincingly argued that the New Deal actually prolonged the economic catastrophe, locking people in poverty longer than would have occurred without all the government programs.
Not only that, but the era bequeathed a legacy of bureaucratic waste, mismanagement, and the largest single expenditure on the federal budget year after year – a Social Security system that is now teetering on the edge of complete insolvency.
How fitting that the progressive green lobby would choose that heritage to embrace. A movement that...
- Plans absurdly expensive endeavors like retrofitting every building in America to be energy efficient for a cool $100 trillion
- Suppresses all efforts to expand safe, clean, and reliable nuclear energy
- Promises to wage war on fossil fuels, thereby locking the earth's impoverished in squalor by preventing the industrialization of the third world
...such a movement is the living embodiment of the New Deal if there's ever been one.
In the 1930's, the Works Progress Administration became infamous for its pointless and wasteful spending projects designed simply to give unemployed people a paycheck. For instance, $3 million went to pay out-of-work professionals for making colorful lanyards and bracelets out of leather strands. It was the perfect picture of the New Deal – exceedingly expensive, staggeringly useless.
How precious that now the Green New Dealers have a perfect picture of the same to call their own:
