Former Enron guru Robert Bradley wants to keep Houston Oil Club eyes from rolling heavenward, lest they notice the free market has already launched electric Spitfires into the sky:
Battery Airplanes? Nope!
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 20, 2022In a sea of government subsidies and PR stunts, the Deep Decarbonization movement regularly tees up alternatives to direct fossil fuel usage.
Posing as technological optimists, the strategy is to change the mindset of mineral energy dominance, so that an attitude of “if government builds it, they will come” can be politically possible.
But what is physically possible is not what is economically prudent, defined as using less resources rather than more to allow other wants to be met.
The market picks winners, leaving losers for government. Rather than tax-and-spend, taxes should be reduced for individuals and business to allow greater market entrepreneurship.
Perhaps sometime in the future a revolution will take hold from what is today’s best practices, but by then, the technology might be wholly different from what the government is subsidizing.
When it comes to airplanes, batteries are the killer: too heavy, too bulky. Energy density, in other words. (And that electricity is probably fossil-fuel created anyway.)
