Clean Energy’s Low-Hanging Fruit

Frequent commenter Larry Lemmert waxes metaphorical with the respect to our clean energy targets:

We need to go after the low-hanging fruit before climbing the tree and going out on a limb to harvest energy that has a negative payback for our efforts. ….Craig has listed a number of these ill devised schemes.

There is no doubt that there IS low-hanging fruit – most obviously in the form of efficiency and conservation, but I think that solar and wind are fairly well proven technologies in which the costs are becoming quite attractive – and bound to fall even further in the near-term — especially if we can find a way of achieving some level of scale.

And yes, there are a lot of bad ideas being hawked by the large and ever-growing ranks of frauds and crackpots. Perhaps more dangerous, there are those whose MO is getting a few ambitious politicians to champion big (and terrible) ideas. “Clean coal” and corn ethanol come immediately to mind.