How romantic is the notion that electric power from wind turbines can replace power from fossil fuels or nuclear reactors!  Dreamy thoughts of soft breezes, those sweet zephyrs gently billowing sails, aspens ruffling, oat stems waving, wispy cirrus drifting.

Solar photovoltaic panels emitting no noxious fumes, and requiring no smelly boilers, nor grotesque water-cooling towers.

And here's the latest nostrum on "energy transition" from Biden's secretary of energy, Jennifer Granholm: "pressing the accelerator, move to clean energy."

But there is no such thing as "clean" energy.  Energy is mass times speed of light squared.  (At least that's what Albert Einstein proffered before theoretical physics was declared a racist social construct.)  Nothing clean about it.  In fact, transforming stored potential energy — molecules and nuclei — into usable power defined as watts and torque needs an explosive event — by definition dirty — to get it all going, period.

Explosive events are the messy and muscular part of transforming potential energy into usable power, the gift to civilization that has reduced or even eliminated poverty for billions of people.

 Wind and solar radiation ain't it.  They are the bucolic byproducts of "toxic masculinity."

There are only two explosive events in the universe, as far as we know: reactions from fissionable or fusionable atomic nuclei and molecular combustion of hydrocarbons or other molecules, such as nitro methane or ammonium nitrate — cum oxygen — into kinetic, thermal, or electrical power.

Other than chemical combustion or a thermonuclear reaction, there are no other sources for an explosive event.  There are no other means of equivalent power measured in enough watts or torque, adjacent to where the power is needed, that can actually be harnessed, or that can be transmitted or stored.

Watts and torque — lots of it — move generators, power station turbines, water pumps, locomotives, ships, cars, industrial equipment, airplanes, satellite launches, sawmills, and servers, day or night, hot or cold, rain or snow or rim ice.  All kinetic, thermal, and electrical power derives from chemical combustion or thermonuclear reactions.

There is no "transition" to a secondary or tertiary degrading waveform as a byproduct of the explosive event, producing the same benefits from the original event — you simply devolve into a fading after-effect.

Wind power is a downstream byproduct of solar radiation in conjunction with the earth's rotation and axial face in its annual revolution around the sun, whose motion is also a by-product of an explosive event that presumably occurred 4.6 billion years ago.

So-called green, clean, or renewable energy is the diminishing — i.e., oscillating progressively weaker — remains of energy transformed from the explosive phase, and can never equate to the original force at the moment of the explosive event.  This is the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Disparate heating and cooling of Earth's atmosphere, mixed by the Coriolis spin effect, distribute air masses of different temperatures and pressures, creating molecular air movement and displacement.  Wind, except for destructive hurricane or tornado force cyclones, which cannot be harnessed, is a degraded dispersed afterthought, with enough oomph for whimsy, and sailing ships rounding Cape Horn, but little else.

And so, extolling a transition to "green" energy or "renewable" energy is worse than a dissembling nomenclature — it is an illusion.  It is a phantasm, a physical impossibility.

Don't tell that to Jennifer Granholm and her pixie dust companions.

Jennifer Granholm, messenger for the transition to nowhere.  Vacant as the minds willfully ignoring the realities of the physical world, where students of the laws of thermodynamics disavow its truths.  The identical breed who also deny biological human sexuality, the truth of DNA.

Jennifer Granholm is not guilty of knowingly disavowing the laws of thermodynamics.  She's an airhead — no, worse than that, a zero Torr vacuum delivering "Huh what are those, what is that?" with a dramatic uptalk dismissive laugh.  She was Phi Beta Kappa in beauty contests and The Dating Game but apparently never devoted a single credit-hour to meaningful science appreciation at Berkeley. 

Hell's bells, even art history majors know something about chemistry.  Otherwise, how would we know how the late medieval and Renaissance painters could dazzle us with those majestic blues and indigos?

Not our heroine Jennifer...

That's the plan, isn't it?  Deny reality of the universe; substitute a nihilistic eschatology.  Otherwise, why would educated science people, even climate gurus who must have studied general and organic chemistry, and physics, know that the green ideology is a dead end yet never disavow Granholm's idiocy?

It's all about the ideology...

Enough with noxious nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, fly ash, and CO.

Enough of oil and gas field roughnecks sweating with pipe, couplings, drilling mud, dirty burn-off, greasy rigs, 24/7 welding, hydraulic smashing, worker camps.

Enough of pipelines, endless railcars laden with coal and crude, refinery industrial infernos.

Instead, laud the angelic silent, sleepy solar photovoltaic panels, innocent as photosynthesis, with blossoms unfolding with no drama, no fuss, no exertion, a Boccherini mandolin beckoning strollers with Vinho Verde and chèvre.

Of course, that is the endgame.  Destroy the unenlightened and unwashed masses with unaffordable food, housing, gasoline, heating oil, propane, and electricity — applauding empty heating oil terminals, disabled natural gas pipelines, power grid brownouts, and rotating blackouts in the midst of heat waves and blizzards. 

Reserve the arboretum and the prosciutto-wrapped gorgonzola and pears for the masters of the universe.

Well, entropy awaits everyone, even useful idiots like Jennifer Granholm.

Photo credit: YouTube screen grab (cropped) via USA Today, CC BY 3.0 license.