“… knowledge is truly the mother of all resources.”
– Erich Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), p. 10.
The peak oil movement, now trying to turn itself into a pro-government-intervention political movement, draws the wrong conclusion by logically progressing from the wrong assumption.
This post revisits this wrong assumption: fixity. From mineral fixity, it is concluded that every act of production and consumption leaves less supply. In this Harold Hotelling world, costs must go up and prices must go up….
But going from the natural science, perfect knowledge, hypothetical world to the real world, just the opposite is true. There is not a fixed supply, known or unknown, from which extractions leave less supply for the future. Costs do not have to go up, and neither do prices.…
“Enron also welcomed the challenge of responsible environmental stewardship, and called on industry to address the issue of global warming even as some companies feared the impact of pollution control on their bottom lines.”
– Bill White, “In These Challenging Times, Enron Deserves Our Thanks,” Houston Chronicle, October 26, 2001.
Former Houston mayor and current gubernatorial candidate Bill White is running away from his far Left energy/environmental past–one that he developed as deputy secretary of the Department of Energy in the Clinton/Gore Administration from 1993 until 1995. And when times were good and Obama cool, Houston’s mayor flaunted his climate alarmism. But no more…
White now pretends to be a fiscal conservative and no longer supports cap-and-taxtrade. But isn’t this the same fellow that as Houston mayor created new staff positions and supported high-cost energy to promote his Climate Alarmism agenda?…
“The people who build wind farms are not environmentalists. . . . Business is a delicate balancing act, and chief executives are always walking a tightrope between the needs of the community, their employees, and the marketplace.”
– Paul Gipe, Wind Energy Comes of Age (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), p. 454.
The front page exposé in the New York Times of another problem of industrial wind—coming on top of Robert Bryce’s eye-opening Wall Street Journal piece on air emissions relating to firming wind energy—presents another problem for Big Wind and Big Environmentalism.
Windpower’s noise problem is nothing new–it has just been swept under the rug by the industrial wind complex. The oft photoshoped pictures of wind turbines skip the sound–that would ruin the idyllic facade of the energy source that is radically uneconomic and an inferior energy source compared to conventional electricity generation.…