Energy Policy
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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October 3, 2012 — Steven Hayward
People who have been around rural western and upstate New York recently tell me the region is chock-a-block with anti-fracking lawn signs and billboards–evidence that the greens are determined to block natural gas production in the Empire State. We noted here last week (and also here) how desperate the Thermocrats who hate energy are to stop this boon for the American economy. It will be interesting to see whether Gov. Andrew Cuomo holds
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October 1, 2012 — John Hinderaker
President Obama’s policies have been bad for everyone, except for the handful who have profited from cronyism and those who prefer to live on welfare, but they have especially devastated poor and middle-income Americans. With a simple chart, Philip Klein explains why this is true with respect to Obama’s “green energy” initiatives. If you are in the top income quintile, energy costs account for only 4.3% of your income, on
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September 28, 2012 — Steven Hayward
It is axiomatic that if the federal government had realized five or six years ago that the technological advances in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing that have set off the current domestic oil and natural gas boom were coming, they surely would have done something to stop it. Now the greens and federal regulators are trying to play catch up: they can’t openly try to stop the boon of new
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September 21, 2012 — Steven Hayward
News item #1: Oil prices stuck between $90 and $100 a barrel. News item #2: North Dakota oil production surpasses Alaska. News item #3: Shell Oil postpones—again—new Alaska drilling project. News item #4: Alaska Permanent Fund payout of oil revenues to citizens falls to lowest level in a decade. Think there might be some connections here? What was that about “all of the above” energy, Mr. Obama?
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September 19, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Japan has abruptly announced that it will back away from its previous pledge to phase out nuclear power by the year 2040: The reversal came after intense opposition to the plan from business groups and communities that host the country’s nuclear power plants, which have warned that abandoning nuclear power will damage Japan’s economy. Of course, in typical media fashion, the Christian Science Monitor today has a story out reporting just
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August 21, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I’m starting to think Power Line needs a periodic omnibus “Chronicles of Ineptitude” to go along with the weekly Green Weenie Award, as there are so many stay stories of foolishness and failure that don’t quite deserve a singular post, but can add up to a worthwhile short roundup now and then. If it becomes a regular feature, perhaps I’ll call it the Power Line Todd Akin Memorial Ineptitude Award.
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August 3, 2012 — Steven Hayward
So just last week I noted here that the developing world was going whole hog for coal, but it looks like it isn’t just countries like India and China. Germany—yes, Germany, the nation that has a California-like fantasy that it will get 80 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2050—is building 23 new coal-fired power plants, partly to replace the nuclear power plants that it improvidently decided to
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July 27, 2012 — Steven Hayward
That the Obama Administration is trying to kill coal in the United States to please its greenie base is not news, but it won’t make a lick of difference to the trend of soaring global coal use, as my pal Robert Bryce points out in the Los Angeles Times today: Prohibiting new coal-fired power plants may please President Obama’s domestic supporters, but it would leave global coal demand and CO2
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July 24, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
In his speech to the VFW today, Mitt Romney derided President Obama’s defense policy as follows: “When the biggest announcement in his last State of the Union address on improving our military was that the Pentagon will start using more clean energy – then you know it’s time for a change.” Romney might have added that Obama has used his “clean energy for the military” policy to line the pockets
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July 19, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Long before the age of government-mandated low-flush toilets and low-wattage light bulbs, William F. Buckley captured the essence of modern nanny-state liberalism with his comment that a liberal is someone who wants to reach in and turn down your shower. People are wise to the endlessly meddling ways of modern liberalism, which is why there is so much resistance to the plans of electric utilities, thoroughly socialized and housebroken by
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July 10, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I recall how in the late 1970s, back during the dark ages of the government-caused “energy crisis,” President Jimmy Carter liked to say that the United States is “the Saudi Arabia of coal.” Yes—there was a time when liberal Democrats were in favor of expanded coal use (unlike today), and Carter’s pro-coal policies led to a significant expansion of coal-fired electricity in the 1980s. But as usual Carter was too
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July 7, 2012 — Steven Hayward
If you want to see how stark raving mad the Left has become, check out this analysis of the power outage in the DC area, and especially Pepco’s perennial sluggishness in restoring power after outages in parts of DC and the Maryland suburbs (always days behind Dominion Power in Virginia): it’s all the fault of Republicans, you see, for favoring the introduction of competition to electricity markets (which never really
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June 24, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Very little, happily. The Rio + 20 conference has ended quietly, with not much damage done. Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), sums up the conference: Apparently, the Rio + 20 Conference ended on Friday. The word apparently is used jokingly. Saturday’s headlines of both the New York Times and the Washington Post failed to include any mention of the closing of the
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June 19, 2012 — John Hinderaker
This video from the Heritage Foundation and the Institute for Energy Research is called “The North Dakota Miracle: Fracking in the Bakken.” North Dakota is booming like no other state in the Union; part of the explanation, of course, is oil. But as you watch the video, ask yourself: could any blue state ever take off economically as North Dakota has? It would be a mistake to attribute North Dakota’s
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June 7, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Creating “green jobs” is the centerpiece of Barack Obama’s failed economic program. But did you ever wonder, what exactly is a green job? If you work at a dump, is that a green job? If you drive a bus? If you work as a lobbyist for oil companies? It turns out that the definition is surprisingly expansive, as we learn when Congressman Darrell Issa questions the Obama administration’s top Department
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