June 18, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Commenter David Hill reminded us yesterday of Steve Martin’s excitement about new phone books (one of my favorite scenes, too), but my seriously analogous moment comes this week every year when BP releases it Annual Statistical Review of World Energy. For a data maven like me, it’s a total geekfest. (“The new BP Review is out! The new BP review is out!”) Since BP makes its data available on downloadable
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June 18, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Now I know what you’re thinking: doesn’t California Governor Jerry Brown deserve a coveted Power Line Green Weenie lifetime achievement award for some of the things he did 35 years ago, when he was governor first time around? Goes without saying. It was back during Brown’s “Moonbeam” years that California embarked on its dirigisme energy policy, with some of the first major subsidies for wind and solar power that gave
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June 17, 2013 — Steven Hayward
So a week or so ago on my post on “Jay Leno For President,” I noticed that frequent Power Line commenter David Hill’s FB identification reads: “Works at Veridian Dynamics.” No way! This is almost as good as spotting the Fred Hirsch Social Limits to Growth reference on The Big Bang Theory. Better Off Ted (the home of Veridian Dynamics) was one of my favorite short-lived shows (not as short-lived as
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June 16, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Obama can’t vote “present” on the Keystone pipeline forever, though he can probably string it out a while longer. He won’t want to punt it to the next president, though, because it might be a Republican who will approve it on Day One. Maybe Obama could just propose an alternate route through Guantanamo, since Gitmo is going to need a new use soon, right? Last month I predicted: What Obama
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June 16, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Let’s review the climate diplomacy story so far. The elephant in the room at the UN negotiations has always been China, India, and other developing nations who have steadfastly refused to agree to future limits on their use of affordable hydrocarbon energy, which they rightly see as the path to becoming fully middle class nations as we and Europe did. The Chinese told Al Gore in Kyoto in 1997 when
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June 15, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Light bulb jokes seem to have fallen out of fashion because, well, I’m tempted to say it’s because light bulbs—at least light bulbs that work—have fallen out of fashion. But that’s a post for a Green Weenie Award, and this is a post about feminism, though I have to admit, the prospects of annoying environmentalists and feminists with one joke is an irresistible temptation. Few jokes are more politically incorrect
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June 14, 2013 — Steven Hayward
So back in the fall Obama thrilled the youth vote by “slow jamming” the news on Jimmy Fallon, but now Obama is being slow-jammed himself by the slowly unfolding multiple scandals, once again the chief unifying theme of this week’s pictorial/cartoonial (?) review. Bonus! Remy Munasifi is out with a new ReasonTV video that slow jams the NSA, down at the bottom. Enjoy your weekend. We’ll be around and on
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June 14, 2013 — Steven Hayward
My post yesterday about liberals and racism, and the way the Left attacks any mention of “states’ rights” as code for racist oppression, brought a note from Prof. Jack Pitney at Claremont McKenna College (not to worry Jack—you’ll make the Power Line 100 roster, though maybe as a group entry since your whole department makes the cut) about how contemporary liberals have suddenly rediscovered the virtue of states’ rights in
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June 14, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Our pal Mark Perry put out the first chart here today, showing that the recent growth in oil production in the United States is the largest in the nation’s history. Some time I’m going to have to go back and collate all of the “peak oil” pronouncements from just a few years ago that U.S. oil production was destined to decline, full stop. Instead, as Mark puts it, “Welcome to
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June 14, 2013 — Steven Hayward
This is one of those weeks where we have to pass out hors d’oeuvres-style mini-green weenies on toothpicks, like they surely serve at receptions at the French embassy. (Quelle horreur!) Start with all the breaking wind of the windmill enthusiasts: a study from the University of North Carolina published recently in Environmental Research Letters finds that “the power capacity of large-scale wind farms may have been significantly overestimated.” The green
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June 13, 2013 — Steven Hayward
John’s post last week on “What Did Lee Atwater Really Say” is a hugely important piece of revisionist journalism, and its theme deserves sustained attention, as the Left these days defaults immediately to calling conservatives and Republicans “racist” because their arguments are otherwise so weak. Notice, in this regard, the new ABC News poll out yesterday finding that a whopping 76 percent of Americans oppose race-conscious college admissions. Rather than
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June 12, 2013 — Steven Hayward
William F. Buckley remarked that he found it impossible to define conservatism in one sentence, but whenever someone insisted that he offer a one-sentence definition he would “punish” them with Richard Weaver’s: “Conservatism is the paradigm of essences towards which the phenomenology of the world is in continuing approximation.” (“With a straight face,” Buckley added.) This suggests one of the reasons why Weaver has never acquired a wider audience, even
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June 12, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The latest chapter in our climate change endgame series comes courtesy of the New York Times, which struggled mightily on Sunday to cope with the inconvenient news that temperatures have been flat for more than a decade now. In “What To Make of a Warming Plateau,” Times reporter Justin Gillis leads with the most compelling scientific argument yet: “luck.” As unlikely as this may sound, we have lucked out in
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June 11, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Remember this meme from a while ago? Check out this screen cap of what’s up right now on the Puffington Host: According to the attached story: For the first time since 2005, more Americans now view former President George W. Bush favorably than unfavorably, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday. Forty-nine percent have a favorable view of Bush, while 46 percent view him unfavorably, the poll found. His ratings
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June 11, 2013 — Steven Hayward
We’ve commented before about the strange phenomenon of the liberal super-rich, not just in Silicon Valley, but also among Wall Street bankers/hedge funders—both major sources of money and political support for Obama and Democrats. What’s the deal here? I always thought Republicans were supposed to be the natural party of big business and finance capital. This is one reason why I mused about the idea of a wealth tax a
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June 11, 2013 — Steven Hayward
John observed here a couple days ago about the rapidly collapsing case for catastrophic global warming, and courtesy of the NoTricksZone, we can take in one of the most devastating and comprehensive critiques of the standard alarmist model by Prof. Murry Salby, who is a climate scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and author of the textbook Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate, published by Cambridge University Press (last
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June 10, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Cast your mind back a ways to the 1980s and early 1990s, and you may recall that our thoughts about technology started undergoing a revision—namely, that far from offering increasingly powerful tools for government oppression and control, personal computers, cell phones, and all the rest of the emergent technologies were becoming means of our liberation as well as barriers to oppressive government. Certainly personal computers and new communication technology—or really
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