“Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the [twentieth] century.”
– John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich (1971) [1]
Doom and gloom—repeatedly falsified—hallmark the long career of John P. Holdren, neo-Malthusian and President Obama’s start-to-finish science advisor. Back at Harvard University, the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy has been been quiet. He avoided making specific, apocalyptic predictions during his Obama years (January 2009– January 2017) and has rarely made the news since. But his many written and spoken statements beginning in the 1970s, never disowned, remain for the record.
Today is a good time to refresh memories of the man who just might be the scariest man in Boston/Cape Cod on this day.
Read—but don’t be frightened.…
“Market conditions back in 1992 no longer exist. Big wind no longer needs the Production Tax Credit, and certainly cannot justify the extraordinary benefits received [3.5¢/kWh pre-tax]. Retaining the subsidy in light of lower installation costs and increased production serves only to further distort the market and bestow a bounty on big wind that far exceeds what 1992 lawmakers could ever have envisioned.”
The American Wind Energy Association’s latest market report touts an industrial- wind-energy construction pipeline of 29,634 megawatts, that, if all built, will bring the US installed capacity to nearly 115,000 MW. Installed capacity stands at 85,000 MW today.
You can bet that all (or most) of the new megawatts will meet the Obama/IRS requirements for full-tax credit eligibility. As we’ve written before, the Production Tax Credit ‘phase-out’ was little more than a 5-year extension of the PTC after Congress looked the other way while the IRS implemented its own definition of the phase-out.…
“If we can’t even use seismic to ‘see’ the vast majority of our underground prospects and resources, we cannot possibly estimate what is actually there. The one thing we can say is: Our current estimates of U.S. oil and gas resources are wrong, and are almost certainly much too low.”
“Producing ANWR’s oil riches represents hundreds of billions in state and federal royalties and corporate income taxes, over the life of the fields, plus billions more in lease sale revenues, plus thousands of direct and indirect jobs, in addition to numerous jobs created when all this money is reinvested in the USA.”
Paul Driessen is a indefatigable intellectual warrior for energy and climate realism. Propelled by a distain for crony environmentalism that promotes global poverty, he has produced weekly opinion-page editorials and written a full-scale book challenging climate alarmism and unmasking energy fantasies.…