Thomas Edison to Henry Ford: Forget Electric Cars (Is this advice from 1896 still relevant?)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 19, 2009

The wisdom of the ages applies to energy. The smartest-guys-in-the-room approach to energy transformation by DOE secretary Stephen Chu, based on a false premise of the unsustainability of hydrocarbon energy, should note such history. The silver bullets that he is looking for have a long, failed history for good reason.

Take for example the electric car,…

CERAWeek 2009: Why Didn’t Daniel Yergin Question Climate Alarmism–and Both Cap-and-Trade and Carbon Taxation?

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 15, 2009

At the just-completed CERAWeek, here in Houston, Daniel Yergin had an excellent opportunity to inject some scholarly realism into the climate-change debate. As a wise man of energy and an opinion leader, he could have stated publicly what many in the vast audience mutter privately, such as:

Global warming has stalled in the last decade or more, bringing into question the high-sensitivity, high-warming scenarios of climate models (the major costs of climate change)
Cap-and-trade CO₂ reduction in the European Union has failed under a variety of metrics–deadweight costs, higher prices, very little gain, unintended consequences
U.S. voters have put climate-change at the very bottom of their list of concerns and affordable energy high on their list of concerns
What emerges from Congress in the next several years will be grotesque–almost regulation and higher energy costs for its own sake (with no appreciable effect on climate).

…

Windpower: Yet Another Texas-sized Problem (Hurricane Risk)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 14, 2009

Windpower is certainly a candidate for the perfect imperfect energy.

It is uneconomic to produce and more uneconomic to transmit. It is unreliable moment-to-moment (the intermittency problem). It is at its worst when it needs to be at its best (those hot summer days). Its aesthetics are bad. It attracts the worst political capitalists (the late Ken Lay, the current T. Boone Pickens). W. S. Jevons was right in 1865 when he concluded that windpower was unsuitable for the industrial age.

Add another problem that is worse for windpower than conventional electric generation: weather risk.…