“City leaders should stop pretending Houston will, or should, transition away from oil and gas anytime soon…. Houston should embrace its role in sustaining and improving the lives of literally billions of people globally each day. It’s a legacy worth standing up for… and even celebrating.” (Doug Sheridan, below)

Hyperbole and government subsidies (bribes, to critics) is the lifeline for inferior energies (think dilute, intermittent, resource-intensive wind and solar). Such as been the case since the 1990s in Houston, Texas when Ken Lay of Enron Corp. empowered executive Robert Kelly to create a new renewables business, a story told here.

And shame-on-shame that some Houston business leaders that should know better have embraced low-density, political energies. I am thinking of Bobby Tutor, chair of the Houston Energy Transition Initiative, and Steve Kean of the Greater Houston Partnership.…

“Funny thing. The climate alarmists’ favorite energies–wind and solar–have ruined the margins of nuclear to cause premature retirements and a lack of private funding for new construction. So the fossil-fuel haters in the nuclear camp find themselves victimized by the climate crusade. It sure is hard being ‘nuclear green’.”

Being active on social media with several thousand followers, I actively engage with my critics for fun and profit. I learn much, and those who have chosen to follow me (6,400+) might also. But I have also attracted scorn, some of the worst kind. My foes are typically wed to an energy dependent on special government failure. The ideological, deep-ecology, Church-of-Climate types spare little invective about how I am a threat to the future. Arguments failing, ad hominem often follows,

I employ plenty of analysis and link to a variety of sources.…

“The Biden Administration’s offshore wind ambition, not only Vineyard Wind, is going the way of the EV debacle. It is time to end the charade, even before the Presidential election.”

All the current political news is keeping this week’s implosion of the fledgling U.S. offshore wind industry off the front pages. “Vineyard Wind shut down after turbine failure sends ‘sharp fiberglass shards’ onto Nantucket beaches,” reported CBS News out of Boston. The worst case event could spell the end of another Biden anti-economic, anti-ecology “climate” program, with only the 132 MW South Fork Wind project off the coast of Long Island under construction.

Vineyard Wind, a joint venture between Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, was at the 10-turbine, 136 MW mark of a planned 62 turbines totaling 806 MW. GE Wind (formerly Enron Wind), the blade-maker, is in trouble too.…

“The infant industry argument is a smoke screen. The so-called infants never grow up.” (Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, 1979, p. 49)

The idea of a transition to a “new energy future” is historically incorrect with wind power, grid solar, and battery-driven cars and trucks. All have a history of non-competitiveness with or displacement by fossil fuels. Energy density explains much of why the renewable energy era gave way to a far better world of coal, oil, and natural gas in recent centuries.

This is taken from a 2014 article by Zachary Shahan for Renewable Energy World, History of Wind Turbines.

——————-

1887: The first known wind turbine used to produce electricity is built in Scotland. The wind turbine is created by Prof James Blyth of Anderson’s College, Glasgow (now known as Strathclyde University).…