Honestly, anyone considering reading the Rothbard essay is much better off reading that “polemic” I linked above. It has two notable advantages:
- it’s funny, rather than a painfully dry slog
- it makes any goddamn sense upon further reflection
Sunshine mostly is, as is wind. On my recent trip around the country I saw tons of windmills, not just in California (though there were more than the last time) but also in the Texas panhandle which I found encouraging.
I don’t want to side with the pro-fracking or Anarcho-Rothbardian contingents, but …
A key word in the inner quote is “empty.” U.S.A. (with Alaska excluded) has about three times the average population density of Norway. And the “tons of windmills” you saw may suggest that saturation is approaching.
Let’s not forgot that energy efficiency must be a a very key part of a total solution. Why does the U.S.A. consume nearly twice the electricity per capita of France or Germany? Or 2½ times that of U.K.? And don’t forget that of all the world’s transport energy — including ships, trains, buses, trucks, and airliners — a whopping 16% is consumed by American passenger automobiles.
A lot of it is houses, both in tending to be so much bigger than in all three countries named and in being less “locally adapted” (things such as whether windows are oriented to “make the house easy to air”, that is, cooler, or “take the sun in”, warmer). Even the tendency in a lot of Europe to “live piled up like rats” (to paraphrase a Doper in another thread) is likely to lower our energy consumption; in the summer, we don’t directly a/c the neighbor but there’s still some lowered electric consumption compared with having every side of the house be at outdoor temps; in winter it’s noticeable that thermostat-directed heating systems will trigger less often when the neighbors are home.
Note that this doesn’t only affect homes: many businesses in Europe are part of those same mixed-use buildings which in a lot of the US are rare and may only happen in downtown areas. My dentist in Spain is on the ground floor of a building with a legal firm on the next floor and four floors of apartments over the lawyers; I went to one in a rural-ish/suburbial area of France which was a freestanding house and had the clinic on the ground floor with the home of the founding partner above.
No; there is considerably more sunshine in countries nearer the equator than there is in Norway. They get all that snow for a reason.