"I have ridden the mighty moon worm!"

A reader at David Frum's blog sends in a brilliant dissection of Gore's claim that "enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world's energy needs for a full year". The whole, glorious triumph of arithmetic is worth reading but here's the conclusion if you've got no time:

"To summarize, yes, we only need a small fraction of energy theoretically available in "renewable" forms. But we also can only convert a small fraction of that energy into usable forms. And it is far from immediately obvious that the latter fraction is greater (let alone a lot greater) than the former. Before we even start complaining about costs (not that we should not - the laws of economics are just as unrepealable as the laws of physics), we need to realize that there is just no huge untapped (and almost bottomless) pool of readily available renewable energy for us to play with (which apparently exists in Al Gore's imagination).

Of course, there's still another question: where
to get power at night?"

On the subject of green crazy, the A Green New Deal report, via Tim Worstall, looks truly wacky. I'll try and find some time to go through it in detail.