A man in California wants to build a “hydrokinetic wave farm” that would bring hydroelectric power ashore near the San Onofre nuclear power plant. Another California developer has received a $3m grant from the US Department of Energy, The Washington Post informs us, to generate energy from kites. And then there is President Barack Obama, who on Wednesday gave an address about the future of energy, promising to use a “critical, renewable resource the rest of the world cannot match: American ingenuity”. Mr Obama, like his boffin compatriots, was laying claim to one archetypically American trait (self-confidence) while exhibiting signs of another (self-delusion).
Since last month’s Japanese tsunami and the nuclear disaster it precipitated at the Fukushima reactor, countries have drawn three different kinds of lesson. First, some have decided that, given the risks of nuclear, the most powerful kind of “clean” energy is a losing proposition. Japan itself feels that way, at least for now. Shutting down nuclear power has meant shutting down office elevators and neon signs across the country, and shifting baseball games from night to day.
Germany, too, appears ready to respond to the dangers of energy by using less of it. Voters in Baden-Württemberg last weekend ousted Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, which has ruled the state without interruption since 1953. They replaced it with the Green party, which had its beginnings in the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and which will be heading a state government for the first time. The CDU tried to join the post-Fukushima discontent, but too late, and unconvincingly.