Happy Holidays from MasterResource

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 21, 2018

MasterResource, a free-market energy blog, turns ten years old on December 26th. We thank our contributors, readers, and parent (Institute for Energy Research) for their continual support. We will resume publication on Wednesday January 2nd.

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Holiday Lighting Humbug

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 20, 2018

Don’t drive. Don’t fly. Don’t eat red meat. And … don’t let yourself enjoy holiday lighting.

It’s not easy being green, they say. Well, gee, life is a bummer when you get the religion of deep ecology. Here are some (sad) examples from the seasons of good cheer.

“With the holiday season, the intensity of light pollution only increases…. Ideally, there would be a public outcry against bigger causes of light pollution, such as street lamps and tall buildings. But until that happens, the simplest thing that one can do is to not put up any Christmas or Hanukkah lights.”

– Heidi Ward, “Holidays & Light Pollution,” United Green Alliance

“Do you love those displays of Christmas (or Hannukah or Kwanza or …) lights? Are you awed by those so impassioned that they string up 1000s of lights in awesome displays worthy of a city center?

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Energy & Modernity: Three Industrial Revolutions (Heartland Institute treatise excerpt)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 19, 2018

This post reprints Section 3.2.1 of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels (Summary for Policymakers here.) This is the fifth volume in the Climate Change Reconsidered series published by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

This treatise from The Heartland Institute continues a tradition of offering citizens and scholars an alternative view of all issues relating to climate science and climate policy. This brief excerpt (subtitles added) will be joined in the New Year with many other excerpts on specific issues to better disseminate the major findings of this major treatise.

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Fossil fuels make possible such transformative technologies as nitrogen fertilizer, concrete, the steam engine and cotton gin, electrification, the internal combustion engine, and the computer and Internet revolution.

Prior to the widespread use of fossil fuels, humans expended nearly as much energy (calories) producing food and finding fuel (primarily wood and dung) to warm their dwellings as their primitive technologies were able to produce.

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