Energy Policy
October 27, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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October 22, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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October 19, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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,
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October 9, 2023 — John Hinderaker
…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
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October 5, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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October 3, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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September 26, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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September 23, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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September 19, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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September 19, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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September 10, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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:
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August 27, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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August 27, 2023 — John Hinderaker
No Tricks Zone publishes a summary of an article by Dr. Klaus-Dieter Döhler, a natural scientist and environmentalist, and Josef Kowatsch, a nature conservationist, that criticizes the global warming industry in Germany. Their criticisms apply equally to that industry in the U.S. The authors point out that reality has refuted the tricked-up models that are the only basis for global warming hysteria: They write: The business model “global warming” is
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August 21, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Sailing can be a lot of fun, but the days when it was the best way to ship large quantities of goods from place to place are long gone. And yet, in keeping with the bottomless stupidity of the present day, here we are: New ship puts wind in the sails of voyage to net zero: For the first time in many decades, the captain of a serious cargo vessel
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August 21, 2023 — John Hinderaker
It is hard to believe, but Germany is on its way to becoming a post-industrial country. What its economy will look like at that point is anyone’s guess, but it won’t be pretty. The Telegraph interviews Monika Schnitzer, who heads Germany’s Council of Economic Experts. She leads off by talking about the need to distance Germany from China: Berlin outlined a plan to “de-risk” the relationship with China last month.
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August 19, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Sweden is making a major move into nuclear energy: Uranium mining is set to return to mainland Europe as the region seeks alternatives to Russian nuclear fuel and Sweden pushes to treble its atomic energy capacity, the country’s climate minister has said. Sweden has lots of uranium: Romina Pourmokhtari, who last year became the youngest cabinet minister in Swedish history at the age of 26, said there was a parliamentary
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August 17, 2023 — Steven Hayward
We noted here the last few days that the predictable rush to blame the horrific Maui fires on climate change goes against what the so-called “consensus” science of the IPCC says about attribution of specific weather events. But you can’t stop the narrative for pesky little details like that. But maybe the climatistas are right—just not in the way they know. In fact, it’s their fault. It is thought that
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