According to Sky News in Britain, the price of electricity is so high that many with lower incomes cannot afford to do their laundry. It takes a blogger to figure out that the reason energy prices are skyrocketing in Britain is trying to make electricity without carbon emissions. Oops.

Science works best when it lives within the boundaries of economic reality. Somehow, in the entire climate change debate we have decided to jettison economic realities. The price tag does not seem to matter, and yet if it doesn’t, look what happens – kids go to school in filthy clothing. After decades of government trying to alleviate poverty, they seem to be creating it.

For the geeky, there was a headline last week that was interesting, “Electro-biodiesel: Scientists make fuel from CO2 that’s 45x more efficient.” OK, quick tutorial – biodiesel is diesel fuel made from things like discarded cooking oil, or similar oils derived from crops, that does not involve taking crude oil from the ground and that burns a bit more efficiently in a diesel engine, producing less carbon emissions. “Electro-biodiesel” is just a way of processing the material using electricity to make it burn even more efficiently. Here’s the abstract for the original paper.

Now, that’s fairly cool science, but does it matter? Two key questions to know that. 1) How much electricity does it take to make the stuff? If it takes more than you get in the diesel engine, the energy economy is all wrong. 2) Where does the electricity used to make it come from? If the electrical generation creates more carbon emissions than are saved by using the fuel in a diesel engine vehicle then the carbon economy is all wrong.

Then there is the actual cost. If a gallon of electro-biodiesel costs double what a gallon of normal diesel costs, then the economy of the entire trucking industry is in ruins. As best as I can tell, none of these questions have actual answers at the moment.

Papers like this come out all the time. It is how science is done. Other scientists and engineers will do the work to answer all the questions I just posed. That’s normal. What’s abnormal here is that some climate change obsessed journalist was scanning recent abstracts, saw this, and decided to put it out on the wire services as if it mattered, when clearly no one yet knows if this will lead to anything practical or not.

And so, climate “activists” will latch on and start lobbying the government to throw our tax dollars at this “promising” new tech until eventually some agency throws a few million at the research just to shut the pests up and our taxes go up.

The best decision maker on what is, and is not, “promising” research is the marketplace. It is time we let it work again.

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