Madsen Pirie on the environment and energy

By Alex Singleton | 6 August 2005

Madsen Pirie, president of the Adam Smith Institute, the free-market think tank, has an interesting couple of blogs on the environment and energy. In Move over Kyoto, he discusses America's alternative approach to Kyoto:

Thanks to a US-led initiative, there is now a valid alternative to the expensive and anti-growth policies enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol. This is exactly why the NGOs and the environmental lobby are already up in arms against it. Their agenda is essentially anti-technology, anti-business and anti-growth. One of its aims is to force us to 'live more simply.' The use of technological solutions by-passes their objectives.

It is now an easy prediction to make that this approach will dominate. Kyoto is unlikely to be renewed post 2012. In its place will be the rapid development and spread of innovative solutions which cut emissions and enable development to occur much more cleanly. The emphasis (and the rewards) will be for cleaner energy, with the result that nations will achieve emission cuts far deeper than the Kyoto targets, and at far less cost.

And in Hydrogen from sunlight, he discusses the fact that we might soon be getting hydrogen from solar power:

Critics of the hydrogen economy point out that most hydrogen is produced by expensive processes involving the use of polluting fossil fuels. Some have suggested that only nuclear energy can produce 'clean' hydrogen, and although the nuclear option is winning support, it is still far from popular among many environmentalists. Some of them regard the hydrogen economy as a distraction from what they see as the need to cut down on growth, transport, and other energy-using activities.

The construction of commercial plants using the new process could come in six to eight years. It fits squarely with the recent US-led initiative to co-operate in developing technology to reduce emissions and dependence on fossil fuels. The recent G8 communiqué promised development of hydrogen-powered vehicles.

The new process may make only a small contribution, but it is a good indicator, and there will undoubtedly be others. The supply of some natural resources may be limited, but human ingenuity seems unbounded.

The Pirie view of global warming seems to me to be the right one: let's deal with global warming, but sensibly. Let's not wreck our economies by rationing energy use but instead use technology to solve global warming cheaply.