wasted

Lynch means "wasted" as in put it in the tank and drive around, buy cheap plastic trinkets from Wal-Mart, build more suburbia. Go shopping. Consume. That sort of thing. Our economy and Merrill Lynch both depend on the generation of huge amounts of waste. The more energy (and resources generally) to waste, the better the economy.

cfm in Gray, ME

Don't take [them= Merril Lynch] ad literum. By "create" the author probably meant ...

No. The MBA-indoctrinated types at ML and other financial houses are accustomed to the verb:
"produce".

WE produce steel.
WE produce bricks and mortar.
WE produce computer chips (and potato chips).
WE produce oil.

Go into any production facility (i.e. potato chips or computer chips, ain't no difference). You can see with your own two lying eyes how our capitalist system mass "produces" all kinds of stuff on the cheap.

Just put Henry Ford's lazy engineers to work and, if properly incentivized by the infusion of capital, why they can "create" and "produce" almost anything.

It's about time they "create" and mass "produce" energy on the cheap. The markets demand it and "they" must therefore supply it. Simple as that.