Environment
February 19, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Al Gore’s hypocrisy is well known: consuming ten times the average household’s electricity in his Tennessee mansion, buying a beachfront mansion in California while warning of sea level rise, flying in private jets while hectoring us about our carbon footprint, etc. Turns out Gore’s investment fund, Generation Investment Management, dedicated to “sustainable” investing (ESG before it was the cool term) is in on the con, too. Bloomberg reports: Espousing a
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February 16, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Ben Weingarten — he who wrote the book on her — alerts me to the story on Ilhan Omar in our newspaper of record: “Ilhan Omar Withdraws Support For East Palestine After Learning It’s In America.” The Bee reported yesterday: Representative Ilhan Omar has canceled a planned rally to support the victims of the East Palestine chemical spill after learning East Palestine is actually in America. “Oh… East Palestine is
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February 5, 2023 — Steven Hayward
One of the favorite talking points of the climatistas is that we need to take account of the financial risk of future climate change. This is one reason the Biden Brigade is trying to impose a number of climate risk requirements on American business, even though by every conventional method of economic forecasting, the present value of hypothetical large costs decades from now is quite small. This is one reason
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January 29, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Robert Bryce identifies the culprits behind the war on natural gas: According to the latest report from Guidestar, [Climate Imperative] took in $221 million in its first full year of operation. … That means that Climate Imperative, which is less than three years old, is already taking in more cash than the Sierra Club… *** [T]he effort to “electrify everything” and ban the use of natural gas in homes and
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January 17, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos kicked off yesterday. For a long time I didn’t take the Davos elite-fest seriously, but it has gained steam: This WEF summit features a record turnout from many of the most powerful government and corporate officials. There will be 379 public officials attending, including 30 heads of state, 56 finance ministers, 19 central bank governors, 39 heads of global organizations, including the
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January 10, 2023 — Steven Hayward
There are a couple of noteworthy passages in Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s speech delivered earlier today over in Sweden about central bank independence, such as: [W]e should “stick to our knitting” and not wander off to pursue perceived social benefits that are not tightly linked to our statutory goals and authorities. . . [W]ithout explicit congressional legislation, it would be inappropriate for us to use our monetary policy or supervisory tools
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January 9, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Mass transit—the holy grail of urban progressivism (Quest for the Holy Rail, as I sometimes put it, or, A Desire Named Streetcar)—is struggling right now. The Wall Street Journal reports today: Several of the nation’s largest urban mass-transit systems are at a crossroads, with ridership still depressed three years into the pandemic and federal aid running out. . . The ridership shortfall is forcing transit authorities to question their decades-old
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January 3, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Oh goody, something new for The View and other fanatical leftists to worry about. Fans of statistical fallacies and other quantitative flim-flam will know that it is possible to demonstrate a correlation between storks and the birth rate, but social science has moved on to much more significant questions, such as “anti-wolf sentiment.” And especially anti-wolf sentiment among—wait for it!—the “far right.” A recent study from the Proceedings of the
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January 2, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Energy analyst extraordinaire Robert Bryce has been writing for over a decade about rising local opposition to major wind and solar installations, which have frequently succeeded in scuttling major projects. He even keeps a comprehensive Renewable Rejection Database on his website with details of hundreds of such instances of local opposition. So of course the New York Times today acts as though they have just discovered that many localities don’t have
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January 2, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Scott’s post about the discovery that the fossil known as Paul Ehrlich is still alive reminded me that I was on TV with him once more than 15 years ago, when, as you’ll see below, I still had hair, and Peter Robinson looks 22 years old. At one point I manage to corner Ehrlich into admitting that recent decades have seen some “good news” about population and the environment, but
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December 13, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Yesterday’s item previewing the announcement of a fusion energy breakthrough included the prediction that environmentalists would oppose fusion if it appears to be practical some time down the road. Silly me: environmentalists already staked out this position—33 years ago! You may recall back in 1989 the sensational announcement by a pair of scientists in Utah who claimed to have developed “cold fusion.” It turned out to be nonsense, if not in
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December 12, 2022 — Steven Hayward
The big buzz in energy today is the report that the Lawrence Livermore Lab has made a potential breakthrough in fusion energy, for the first time getting more energy out of a fusion reaction than was put in to ignite the fusion process: The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in
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November 7, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Britain’s “conservative” administration led by Rishi Sunak has opened the door to paying “climate reparations” to poor countries: Britain has opened the door to paying climate change reparations to developing countries by supporting talks on the issue at the Cop27 summit. On Sunday, at the meeting in Egypt, UK negotiators backed a last-minute agreement to address “loss and damage” payments to countries badly affected by climate-related disasters. Climate-related disasters have
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October 4, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Steve recently wrote: One of the first things I teach students on the first day of energy policy classes I have taught is how energy density works, and how a battery is a device to store energy at high densities. But at a certain point, when you increase the energy density enough, we don’t call it a battery any more. We call it a bomb. I got an email today
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October 3, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Human history has largely been a struggle to get enough to eat. Starvation was an ever-present threat, almost everywhere, until very recently. Only in the last century or two has even part of the world learned how to produce an abundant and reliable supply of food. It requires a scientific approach to hybridization, crop rotation, intensive fertilization, pest control, and more. As a result of these modern farming methods, for
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September 23, 2022 — Steven Hayward
I’m slowing working my way to an article on whether Joe Biden or Vladimir Putin has done the most damage to the climate campaign, but for now I’ll just take satisfaction that the Washington Post has seemingly discovered the learning curve when it comes to energy. Yesterday the Post noted that, gosh, California has a problem generating enough electricity from its massive deployment of solar power when the sun goes
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September 11, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Are people finally starting to catch on to the fact that electric vehicles are a terrible idea? I hope so. Bjorn Lomborg makes the case in accessible form in the Wall Street Journal. To begin with, EVs don’t even save much on CO2 emissions: Over its lifetime, an electric car does emit less CO2 than a gasoline car, but the difference can range considerably depending on how the electricity is
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