The Hoodwinked King

A story

In a faraway kingdom, there was a very clever rich man who wanted to get even richer. He was very influential, because everyone knew he was rich and they wanted to please him, hoping for future favors.

So he developed a money-making plan. He started a company that would get free energy from the wind. His wind machines would have giant propeller blades that would turn generators to make electricity. He would mount the wind generators and propellers on top of very high towers, because the wind is stronger as you get higher above the ground. The towers could be seen from miles away. They were so high and the generators were so big and heavy that special cranes had to be built. The electricity would be brought down from the high towers with copper wires. He would build these very high wind towers out in the windiest areas of the country. Since few people lived in those windy areas, he would build new transmission towers with miles of copper wires to get the electricity to the cities where it was needed.

The rich man realized that even though the wind was free, the electricity from the wind generators wouldn’t be. In fact, the energy they produced would cost more than the electric energy that was already being produced by simply using natural gas boilers to make steam that powered the generators that made their electricity.

This man was so clever that he knew just how to get lots of gold – all he had to do was get the king to pay his company’s expenses with gold from the treasury.

Here’s how he did it. He hired an expert meteorologist to write a book saying the fumes that were spilled into the air by natural gas generators were very bad. The book said these horrible fumes were making the whole country warmer every year, and soon it would get so hot all the crops would burn up and everyone would die. It would be like the end of the world. Something had to be done, immediately. It was an emergency.

To make sure everyone read the book, the rich man paid the TV producers and the newspaper and magazine producers and college professors and all the experts to spread the word. Then he lobbied the very elite advisors to the king and made them promises that if they got the king to support his wind tower business from the treasury and make rules to stop the use of natural gas, he would share some of his profits with them.

It would be so expensive to build the new electric system that no one expected the rich man to pay for it himself. To get the new system started, the king would have to use gold from the treasury, but of course it had to be done to save the country from burning up if the horrible fumes from natural gas weren’t stopped.

There were a few people that questioned the plan. They said that coal had even worse fumes than gas, but when the country’s industries and steamships and locomotives had all been energized by so much coal that the tree trunks turned black with soot, why didn’t that make the climate so warm it burnt up way back then? There were a few folks that remembered the record high temperatures about 80 years earlier, and they had survived it without dying. There were some biologists and farmers that said the fumes from natural gas weren’t really bad at all, in fact they made things grow greener because plants liked those fumes. Some economists calculated that the change would be impossibly expensive. Some nature lovers said the giant propellers would kill birds. Some folks said the high towers were ugly and ruined the scenery. A farmer was killed on his tractor when a propeller blade flew off its tower.

But all those people were shouted down by the majority and by all the experts and the high placed advisors to the king.

So the king paid the gold that was needed to get started right away. As the rich man had more and more wind energy towers built, each year that went by, new costs that had not been foreseen came up, so the king had to spend more gold than at first. As the years went by, the costs kept going up. The propellers were so big and the generators so heavy that the high towers had to be supported by tons and tons of steel-reinforced concrete footings. The transmission lines took so much copper wire to get the electricity to the cities that there was some talk that they might run out of copper, and that of course made copper prices go up.

The crane and concrete and steel and generator and copper companies were happy with all the new business, but the king started to run short of gold. So he had to raise taxes to bring more gold back into the treasury. At first no one minded because it was worth it to stop the fumes and to save the country from burning up.

The rich man’s wind business was very profitable because so much of his costs were being paid with the king’s gold. But he did still have to raise his prices because it was such an expensive way to make electricity, and the electric companies had to pass on the price increases, so everyone’s electric bills went up.

After a few years, the people were too broke to pay any more for taxes, and the king was afraid they might revolt, so he had to get more gold by borrowing it from other countries that still had plenty of gold because they were still using coal and natural gas.

But when the debt grew very large, the king couldn’t borrow any more because the other countries started to worry that he might never be able to pay them back.

So the king made paper certificates that said they were as good as gold, and used them to pay for the generators and the high towers and the copper and the concrete and the steel.

Then catastrophe struck. Just when the system had been almost all changed over to the free wind for electricity, and all the gas generators had been shut down and gone out of business, the wind stopped blowing. The wind didn’t blow for a month. No one had any electricity. The king was out of gold, and no one wanted paper certificates because they knew they weren’t backed by anything.  He realized he had been hoodwinked, and it was too late to change back to the old system.

But the rich man was doing fine, because of course he knew all along that the natural gas fumes weren’t bad, so he had his own gas-fired generator and plenty of electricity and lots and lots of gold from all the profits he had made on his wind energy business.