Tom Stacy On Wind Power: At the (Ohio) Grassroots

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- September 20, 2017

“Less expensive natural gas is a boon to drilling host communities because it is a boon to natural gas customers. Wind energy is a boon to local communities looking to make a buck off of forced government wealth transfers — aka ‘picking winners and losers.’ That government force comes in many forms, such as special taxpayer-funded production subsidies, local tax abatement, and state renewable energy mandates.”

Tom Stacy is, indeed, a “heroic Ohioan for affordable electricity.” Underpaid and overworked, he speaks truth to wind power at every opportunity in his state and beyond. His advice?

Protest loudly, politely, and often, and sue at every turn. Expose greed and support sound science…. Finally, always speak from a position of integrity and truth and NEVER exaggerate the way the wind industry does.

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“The Utter Complete Total Fraud of Wind Power’ (Matt Ridley presents the facts)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- September 19, 2017

“[I]t is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the extraordinary polymath Sir David MacKay pointed out, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables.”

– Matt Ridley, “Wind is an Irrelevance to the Energy and Climate Debate“(May 15, 2017)

An op-ed and blog post several months ago by Matt Ridley is still making the rounds. A great thinker, Ridley gets to the essence of things. He is hard to ignore, even by his critics. Ridley’s book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010), is a seminal contribution in the Julian Simon tradition. (His other work can be found here.)

Here are some salient excerpts from his op-ed/post:

“[Wind power’s] contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

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State Department Climate Pullback (remembering Tillerson’s 2013 views)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- September 14, 2017

“How do you want to deal with that great social challenge? To what good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers in the process of those efforts when you don’t know exactly what your impacts are going to be? So we [at ExxonMobil] have taken a much more balanced view and we said let’s manage the things, we know how to do manage today.” – Rex Tillerson (2013)

“Rex Tillerson just took the State Department another step back from acting on climate change,” laments Samantha Page at ThinkProgress (Center for American Progress). “This is part of a streamlining that reduced a number of special envoy positions as redundant or outdated.”

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