Energy Policy

The Golden Age of Coal

Featured image You wouldn’t know it from reading the newspapers, but that is what we are living in. The recently-concluded COP28 conference touted a coming end to the use of fossil fuels, with coal first in line for extinction. But that isn’t happening. Robert Bryce has the data: The [International Energy Agency] expects coal use to rise by 1.4% this year and set a new record of 8.5 billion tons. So more »

COP Who Cares?

Featured image The UN-sponsored COP28 has broken up, and hundreds of private jets are wending their way back to civilization from Dubai. COP28 was the subject of high drama during its closing days. Some said the conference was a disaster; Al Gore, for example: COP28 is now on the verge of complete failure. The world desperately needs to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but this obsequious draft reads as »

Outside China, Rare Earths Are Rare

Featured image The Chinese Communist Party may be evil, but it isn’t stupid. It has been working on dominating the world’s supply of critical minerals for quite a few years now. Geopolitical Monitor has “A Brief History of US-China Rare Earth Rivalry.” First, a little background: Rare earth elements (REEs), comprising 17 (15 commercially relevant) chemical elements and soft heavy-metals like Thulium and Cerium, are vital in modern technologies from cell phones »

Are EVs a Doomed Technology?

Featured image Electric vehicles have been around for 100 years or so. They lost out to gasoline powered cars because gasoline powered cars are better. Is that ever going to change? At the Telegraph, Michael Kelly draws an analogy to the Concorde: The man in the street has failed to embrace BEVs for the same reason he failed to embrace Concorde nearly 50 years ago: the extra cost – of order £10,000 »

$17 a Gallon to Charge an EV

Featured image How much does it cost to charge an electric vehicle, and who picks up the tab? Steve Moore’s Committee to Unleash Prosperity has this: Uncle Sam pays the automakers billions of dollars to produce EVs. Then they write a check for $7,500 to consumers who buy an EV and many states kick in up to another $5,000. Now, the government is paying to charge the batteries for the rich people »

Green Dreams Going Up In Smoke

Featured image Wind and solar are both terrible methods of generating electricity, both expensive and unreliable. The one thing that can make the situation worse is the drive to electrify everything, including motor vehicles. The impracticality of this “green” vision has become blindingly obvious, and the “green” movement has begun to fall apart. Steve noted this afternoon the collapsing share prices of renewable energy companies. Here are some more indications that the »

Another Nail In the Global Warming Coffin

Featured image Statistics Norway, the government agency that produces official statistics for that country, released a report last month titled “To what extent are temperature levels changing due to greenhouse gas emissions?” The report concludes: [T]he results imply that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be sufficiently strong to cause systematic changes in the pattern of the temperature fluctuations. In other words, our analysis indicates that with the »

Vaclav Klaus, After All

Featured image SALZBURG, Austria, October 19—Back in August of 1990 I attended my first-ever meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Munich, West Germany, not far from my current temporary location. I was still a sluggish graduate student at the time, long past when I should have completed my dissertation, but somehow I had contrived to snag a fellowship to attend, and present a paper whose precise topic I don’t now recall, »

The Nations That Dominate the Global Economy…

Featured image …will be those that adopt sane energy policies. Unfortunately, that group does not include the U.S. Our government is determined to drive the coal industry, and coal-fired power plants, out of business, with natural gas next on the list. Does that make any sense? David Blackmon writes in the Telegraph: As the United States continues to rapidly retire its dwindling fleet of coal-fired power plants in the name of fighting »

What Keeps the Lights On?

Featured image Grid Brief is a daily email for energy junkies. It is well worth receiving, you can subscribe here. Yesterday’s email included a graph that shows the past week’s electricity generation, from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This shows the sources of electricity for the nation as a whole. Click to enlarge: This is pretty typical. Natural gas is by far the dominant source of power in the U.S. Gas plants »

If Wind and Solar Get Any Cheaper, We’ll All Go Broke

Featured image One of the most laughable assertions of today’s debased era is the claim that wind and solar energy are “cheap.” Hey, wind and sunshine are free, right? So, sure, if you don’t count any of the costs, wind and solar are really cheap. So why are electricity costs rising rapidly? Actually, it could be worse. If solar and wind were not heavily subsidized, and the full cost of those mostly-futile »

Europe: Tangled Up In Green

Featured image Opinion polls indicate that the vast majority of Europeans have drunk the global warming kool-aid, at least in theory. But things change when they are confronted with “green” realities. The Wall Street Journal reports: For years, Europe has been at the forefront of the global drive to curb carbon emissions and slow climate change, pledging to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Overwhelming numbers of Europeans say they like the »

Weimar 2?

Featured image Destroying the German economy isn’t easy, but that country’s government is working hard at it. Since the Industrial Revolution, it has been hard to imagine a de-industrialized Germany. But that is the way things are trending. The London Times reports: Germany is in the teeth of a “severe and sustained downtrend”, experts warned after a closely watched survey showed that a deep contraction in factory output was keeping its economy »

RFK Jr. Is a Crazy Left-Winger

Featured image Some conservatives have an unreasonably positive view of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., based on the fact that he sounds sensible on two or three issues. But in fact, he is nuts, as manifested most grotesquely in his conviction that Sirhan Sirhan did not murder his father. Beyond that, he is, on the large majority of issues, an unreconstructed far left-winger. Take fracking. My colleague Isaac Orr points out that Kennedy »

The Daily Chart: The High Cost of High-Cost Energy

Featured image Everyone knows that Germany was the “first mover” on the net-zero bandwagon, spending more than a trillion Euros over the last 15 years on its “energiewende” (“energy revolution”) only to see their greenhouse gas emissions begin rising again, and last year reviving coal-power to keep the lights on. One thing they did achieve was causing consumer energy prices to roughly double. I guess that “wind-and-solar-are-cheaper” isn’t working out according to »

Wind Energy Will Never Be Affordable

Featured image There is a financial crisis in the wind industry. You can see it in headlines like Support for offshore wind sinks as costs soar, and The ill wind of offshore wind projects. At the Telegraph, Matt Ridley sums up the ineluctable reasons for the current crisis: The MPs who have forced Rishi Sunak into a U-turn on onshore wind power love to repeat the favourite slogan of the wind industry: »

The Pipeline from Hell

Featured image Did you know that there is a federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA)? But of course there is. And you might suppose that since pipelines carry mostly oil and natural gas, it would be housed inside the Department of Energy. But no: it is part of the Department of Transportation. So we have yet another instance of government cabinet department that does nothing to produce an increased supply »