Energy Policy
November 3, 2025 — John Hinderaker
A week ago, Bill Gates released a long memo on climate that got a great deal of attention. He said more or less what critics like Bjorn Lomborg have been saying for a long time: sure, increased levels of carbon dioxide will tend to increase global temperatures to some extent. But the increase will be modest and will not have catastrophic consequences. Rather than impoverish the world in a futile
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October 30, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Pretty much every calculation you have ever seen relating to “green” energy–cost estimates, productivity claims, and so on–has been wrong. “Green” energy really is a scam, as President Trump says. It is consistently sold on the basis of fake science. The latest case in point comes from Great Britain, via the Telegraph: “Miliband admits wind power less reliable than expected.” The Government has slashed forecasts for the amount of electricity
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October 29, 2025 — John Hinderaker
The American people, and others around the world, have been sold a bill of goods on wind and solar energy. These electricity sources are intermittent, unreliable, and ridiculously expensive. Those defects supposedly were outweighed by their environmental benefits. But are there, in fact, any environmental benefits? The reality is that both wind and solar energy are terrible for the environment. This is because they are absurdly low-power energy sources, so
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October 25, 2025 — Bill Glahn
Gasoline parices are dropping, which is somehow devastatingly bad news for Pres. Trump. The Hill newspaper reports, Gasoline prices have fallen to just over $3 per gallon. That’s good news for consumers and the Trump administration after President Trump promised to bring down prices… Good news for Trump? Wait for it… but it could complicate a “drill, baby drill” agenda. And whether prices will stay low may depend on whether
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August 24, 2025 — John Hinderaker
I believe it was Milton Friedman who pointed out, many years ago, that you can have a welfare state or you can have open borders, but you can’t have both. Not for the first time, Friedman has been proved right the hard way. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has made it official: The German welfare state is no longer financially sustainable, Friedrich Merz said on Saturday. The chancellor argued for a
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August 21, 2025 — John Hinderaker
One of President Trump’s best qualities is that he understands energy–in particular, the vital need for affordable, reliable energy. Trump understands, further, that “green” energy technologies, wind and solar, are not and cannot ever be either affordable or reliable. They are essentially a heist, an attempt to transfer trillions of dollars out of certain industries, and into others. Also, out of the United States and into China. If the Left
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July 23, 2025 — Bill Glahn
I’m guessing very few of you have ever heard of an entity called the International Energy Agency (IEA). The only reason I’m familiar with it is from my past employment in the energy industry, years ago. From Bloomberg, House Republicans Move to Pull Funding for International Energy Agency. It’s only $6 million a year, so it won’t, in a single stroke, wipe out our $37 trillion national debt. But a
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July 15, 2025 — John Hinderaker
This won’t come as a surprise to regular Power Line readers, but there is no such thing as cheap “green” energy. Remarkably, some liberals are still trying to sell that concept–wind and sunshine are free, so “green” must be cheap! Yeah, wind and sunshine are free, but wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and transmission lines are horrifically expensive. As is the backup reliable power that is always needed because wind
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July 11, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Wind and solar energy, along with the batteries and transmission lines they require to function even minimally, are inherently bad for the environment. But sometimes they are even worse, as when turbine blades fail. This sad story from the Nantucket Current is one we have seen repeatedly around the country: GE Vernova will pay the town of Nantucket and island businesses $10.5 million as part of a settlement related to
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June 30, 2025 — Bill Glahn
The headline from The Hill newspaper, 1 hurt in windmill blade incident on Maryland highway The Hill explains, A windmill turbine blade became loose Monday morning, crossing the median on Interstate 70 in Maryland and causing traffic to be backed up for several miles. The Hill‘s report has a short video of the scene in Maryland. As I motor about the countryside, I already have a long list of hazards
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June 27, 2025 — John Hinderaker
One of the worst things about wind and solar energy is that they are terrible for the environment. The principal reason for this is that, apart from being intermittent, they are low-intensity. This means that even when they do produce electricity, it is in ridiculously small amounts. As a result, it takes an enormous number of wind turbines and solar panels to generate a perceptible amount of electricity, and that,
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June 17, 2025 — Bill Glahn
Now the truth can be told about that massive electrical grid failure in the Iberian peninsula back in April. From SkyNews, The massive power cut that plunged huge swathes of Spain and Portugal into chaos earlier this year was caused by a miscalculation, the Spanish government has said. ,”Miscalculation.” SkyNews reports, There was discussion about whether a cyberattack was to blame, but today Spain’s energy minister said the issue was
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June 17, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Green energy is a disaster in several ways: it is inherently unreliable and ridiculously expensive. Some people naively assume, however, that wind and solar energy make up for these liabilities by being good for the environment. They couldn’t be more wrong. The basic problem with wind turbines and solar panels (plus hypothetical batteries) is that they are extremely low-intensity. Do they work? Intermittently, yes. But compared with conventional energy sources,
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May 18, 2025 — John Hinderaker
At AmericanExperiment.org, Sarah Montalbano reviews the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator’s prospects for providing stable electricity in the summer that is about to begin. MISO runs the electric grid for 15 states in the central United States: The Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO) is at risk of running low on electricity this summer, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) 2025 summer reliability assessment. *** MISO will see an
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May 14, 2025 — John Hinderaker
I’m so old, I can remember when people thought $100 billion was a lot of money. But not today. “Green” energy may be a bigger source of corruption than anything else. We have written about the EPA scandal, where, in the dying days of the Biden Administration, many billions of dollars went out the door to left-wing nonprofits–like throwing gold bars off the Titanic, as one EPA official said. This
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May 13, 2025 — John Hinderaker
The Democrats’ “green” agenda has hurt our standard of living in many ways. It has made energy more expensive, and has made our appliances worse. Why? Because of energy efficiency requirements. The quality and durability of appliances sold today are significantly worse than they were decades ago. Then, too, there is the war on gas appliances and shower heads. All of this is changing under the Trump administration. As part
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May 9, 2025 — John Hinderaker
In the London Telegraph, Diana Furchtgott-Roth traces the economic suicide of Western Europe: At the Munich Leaders’ Meeting in Washington DC this week, vice-president JD Vance put his finger on a major cause of Europe’s recent decline. “One of the things that the Germans were very good about,” he declared, “is that they had kept the industrial strength of their economy consistent with the first world standard of living. But
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