“We are old climate veterans who have tried to do our part, in every way we know how, to keep our fossil-fuel addicted civilization from driving off a cliff. Are we tired? Sure. Discouraged? Absolutely. Pissed off? Yep. Sad? Call it broken-hearted.”
– Kathleen Dean Moore and SueEllen Campbell, Why We Won’t Quite the Climate Fight, Earth Island Journal, January 28, 2019.
“The admittedly ‘tired … discouraged … pissed off … broken-hearted’ deep ecologists can either live in gloom and despair or check their premises to entertain happiness…. Don’t quit–study. Consider Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource 2 for starters. And live joyfully.” (below)
It is a fossil-fuel world for as far as the eye can see. Abundant, affordable, and reliable, mineral energies are the ones that consumers voluntarily purchase.…
The [Houston] conference excitedly states that “momentum for a national carbon dividend is growing.” In fact there is momentum against a carbon tax to enable a “dividend.” As Justin Gillis wrote in the New York Times : “Efforts to sell Republicans on the idea that [a CO2 price] is the most market-friendly approach to the emissions problem have failed miserably, and will continue to fail.”
This Saturday at the University of Houston, a conference will be held on carbon taxes. Titled Texas Energy & Carbon Pricing: Ready to Lead, the event’s main organizer is Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL), which (in its own words)
is working with Congress in a non-partisan way to advocate for a market-based climate solution that will allow consumers and businesses alike, including those with oil/gas interests here in Texas, to use the market to identify the most cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.…
“The nuclear industry has effectively priced itself out of the market for new power plants, at least in market-based economies. That’s why nuclear power’s share of global power generation has dropped to around 11 percent — its lowest level in decades.”
– Joe Romm, ThinkProgress, February 4, 2019
As he periodically does, Joe Romm has again trashed nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels, claiming that wind power and solar power are cheaper, can access affordable batteries for overcome intermittency, and can be scaled to the quantities needed (wrong, wrong, and wrong–a story for another day).
In “Taxpayers Should Not Fund Bill Gates’ Nuclear Albatross,” Romm states:
The reality is that nuclear power is so uneconomical that existing U.S. nuclear power plants are bleeding cash — and in many places it’s now cheaper to build and run new wind or solar farms than to simply run an existing nuclear power plant.…