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Human Achievement Hour (Earth Hour made happy!)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- March 18, 2016

The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual worldwide celebration of human progress is tomorrow, March 19th. Turn on the lights and celebrate the wondrous ability of natural gas, coal, and oil to overcome Obama energy policy and forced renewable penetration to keep the lights on in despite-all fairly affordable way.

As CEI explains:

Human Achievement Hour is a time to celebrate innovations that help us all live better, fuller lives. Human Achievement Hour is also the counter-event to Earth Hour, where participants symbolically renounce the environmental impacts of modern technology by turning off their lights for an hour. We believe it’s a misguided effort that ignores how access to affordable energy helps people around the world.

How to celebrate with us? Share your favorite human achievement or innovation that makes your life easier!

Smil on Oily Wind Turbines

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- March 17, 2016

“For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels.”

– Vaclav Smil, “What I See When I See a Wind Turbine (March 2016).

Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, has published 37 books and almost 500 papers on “the fields of energy, environmental and population change, food production and nutrition, technical innovation, risk assessment, and public policy.”

One of the great energy experts of our age, Smil’s output easily rivals whole US Department of Energy laboratories which, incidentally, are easy candidates for elimination under a new political regime.

This month, Dr. Smil’s published a short piece in IEEE Spectrum titled “What I See When I See a Wind Turbine.”…

“Denier” Charge from Jerry Taylor: How Low Can He Go?

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- March 15, 2016

“Let’s switch out for a better [climate] policy…. Then conservative activists who continue to be in the denialist camp on climate change will find themselves completely isolated.”

– Jerry Taylor, quoted in “Libertarian Group Takes on Conservatives on Carbon Tax.” Energy & Environmental News (sub. req.), March 3, 2016.

“Alarmists … clearly have decided that the best way to win the global warming debate is by shouting down the opposition and demonizing them in the eyes of the public. But that is not dispassionate scientific debate; it is more like a ‘struggle meeting’ during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”

– Jerry Taylor, The Heated Rhetoric of Global Warming, Cato Institute Commentary, September 15, 1997.

Climate ‘denier’ or ‘denialist’ is a term of political hate speech. Recently, it came from a source that for most of the last quarter century was labeled a ‘denier’ by the pugnacious Left. 

Climate Malthusianism: James Hansen’s Latest

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- March 3, 2016

Taylor at RFF: Don’t Assume the Problem, Debate It (why price carbon dioxide?)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- March 1, 2016

Jerry Taylor: Climate Change as ‘Political Theater’ (so why become an actor?)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 29, 2016

Dear Daniel Yergin: Give Alex Epstein the Microphone at CERAWeek

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 22, 2016

Julian Simon: A Pathbreaking, Heroic Scholar

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 16, 2016

Jane Mayer on Energy Policy: Some Corrections

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 11, 2016

Electric Vehicles: Perennial Subsidies, Hope, Fail (data point from 1996)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 1, 2016