Energy Policy
January 18, 2013 — Steven Hayward
All the leaves are brown, and the budget is still red, even with Jerry Brown’s big income and sales tax hike the voters foolishly approved back in November. The latest entirely predictable piece of news was reported yesterday. The Wall Street Journal headline tells the story succinctly: “California Budget Hit By Facebook’s IPO.” Wait a moment: how exactly is a budget “hit” by the creation of massive new liquid wealth?
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January 3, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I mentioned here yesterday that Pennsylvanians are enjoying a surge of prosperity while New York Governor Andrew Cuomo kowtows to cheap-energy-hating environmentalists who are making their last stand again natural gas. Cuomo keeps hiding behind “safety reviews,” missing several deadlines for a decision and calling for additional investigation. Today the New York Times reports that Cuomo has been sitting on a state Health Department assessment that concluded months ago that
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January 2, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The good folks at the Energy Information Administration have produced this stunning 22-second video that shows the boom in natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania from 2005 to April 2012. While you watch this explosion of prosperity for the Keystone state and contemplate with glee the anguish this is causing environmentalists, keep in mind that next-door New York has continued to ban most natural gas exploration and production, which not only
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December 28, 2012 — Steven Hayward
If Matt Daaaymon was hoping his new Arab-funded film “Promised Land” would do for natural gas “fracking” what “The China Syndrome” did for nuclear power, he’d better hope for a sequel to “Team America” to rescue him from being an embarrassment to the professional Left. John already took official Power Line notice of the movie a few weeks ago, and I already gave Damon a Green Weenie back in September
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December 24, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The federal budget is not the only thing looking at dropping off a fiscal cliff. One of the loose ends caught in the whole mess is the renewal of the “production tax credit” (PTC) for wind power, a supposedly “temporary” measure to help the industry get on its feet, but which, like wartime rent control, somehow becomes a permanent necessity to “save jobs” now. The wind industry is currently lobbying
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December 10, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The defenders of clean green energy “investment” (which I put in scare quotes because when a liberal says “investment,” he means “taxpayer subsidy”) say we should look past Solyndra, A123, and other bankruptcies because it is normal for there to be failures in an infant industry. But the Washington Times reported last Thursday that the RENIXX index–the specialty index for renewable energy companies (it stands for the Renewable Energy Industrial
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November 8, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Energy was an issue, sort of, in the campaign, and in the aftermath there’s lots of chatter about whether, among other things, Obama will now approve the Keystone pipeline, or block it, as his enviro buddies demand. Whether he’ll regulate the heck out of hydrocarbon energy, or get out of the way of the extraordinary boom (and boon) the private sector unexpectedly dropped in his lap. (The shale gas boom
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November 1, 2012 — Steven Hayward
One of my last projects at AEI was writing and producing, with my frequent writing partner Ken Green (who nailed it on The News Hour last night), a series of short videos on basic energy literacy. One of the biggest problems for office holders, the media, and the public alike is that energy seems simple. Why not? you plug things in or throw a switch, and voila!–it works! But in
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October 19, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The fine folks at The Onion, who I sometimes think are closet conservatives because they skewer liberal icons so often (yes, I know the same thing happens on The Simpsons, and why this happens), have produced the following video sendup of a TED talk about compost-powered cars (3:30 long): Trouble is, how can you tell the difference between this sendup and what liberals actually believe about energy, as I explained
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October 18, 2012 — John Hinderaker
The vision of the future touted by many environmentalists includes electric automobiles. The dream of the electric car is an old one; for quite a few decades now, electric vehicles have supposedly represented the future. Thus, a friend sent me this photocopy of a newspaper article titled “Ford Chief Says Electric Car Now Is Under Development.” The article appeared in January 1971; click to enlarge: Ford Motor Co. is nearing
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October 17, 2012 — Steven Hayward
So several polls give the general decision slightly to Obama, though this may be grading on a curve, based on his improvement from his total suckitude in the first debate. Piece by piece, however, it looks like Romney may have come out ahead, at least on the issues that matter most to voter decisions, as this screen shot of the CNN poll breakdown shows: And on energy, while Romney might
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October 17, 2012 — Steven Hayward
While we continue to dissect last night’s debate, let’s savor this wonderful video (just 2:30 long) from the Michigan Economic Development Association about the whole A123 debacle (filing for bankruptcy right before Obama touted “securing the energy of the future” even as he disdains the energy of the present). This pretty much captures the entire liberal delusion about energy and economics: Footnote: Back in April I mistakenly lumped A123 in
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October 15, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Charles Krauthammer mocked President Obama mercilessly last spring when Obama mentioned the potential for algae-based fuels in our future. I share the instinct for Obama mockery on general principle, but think the great Dr. K might have gone just a bit too far on this one, for one simple reason: unlike ethanol, wind, and many other energy boondoggles, there is a lot of private capital going into algae energy research,
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October 12, 2012 — Steven Hayward
So was Biden really trying to outdo Al Gore with his debate performance? Perhaps Biden, a lifelong political hack, has Gore envy in more ways than one, and is already practicing investment hedging, looking past a prospective election loss to a post-VP career as a crony capitalist. It was a strange coincidence that the Washington Post chose this week to run a story about how Al Gore is thriving as
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October 11, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The Obama campaign is running an ad that tries to inoculate themselves against the charge of being anti-coal. This, from the guy on record saying that he wants to bankrupt coal-fired power, and whose EPA has proposed rules that will effectively prohibit any future coal plant from ever being built in the U.S. again, with more rules to throttle coal mining (so don’t even think of exporting coal to China)
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October 6, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Boy is this going to ruin Tom Friedman’s day: news out of China is that they have an even bigger Solyndra problem than Obama. From the New York Times news pages: China’s strategy is in disarray. Though worldwide demand for solar panels and wind turbines has grown rapidly over the last five years, China’s manufacturing capacity has soared even faster, creating enormous oversupply and a ferocious price war. The result
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October 5, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Want to give the Obama campaign even more heartburn than it has now? How about putting California in play? Seems farfetched, but then people outside of California might not have noticed that gasoline pump prices jumped as much as 30 cents a gallon yesterday. That’s how much pump prices jumped between lunch and late afternoon here on the central coast; the figure is lower in the major metropolitan areas apparently.
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