“The infant industry argument is a smoke screen. The so-called infants never grow up.” (Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, 1979, p. 49)
The idea of a transition to a “new energy future” is historically incorrect with wind power, grid solar, and battery-driven cars and trucks. All have a history of non-competitiveness with or displacement by fossil fuels. Energy density explains much of why the renewable energy era gave way to a far better world of coal, oil, and natural gas in recent centuries.
This is taken from a 2014 article by Zachary Shahan for Renewable Energy World, History of Wind Turbines.
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1887: The first known wind turbine used to produce electricity is built in Scotland. The wind turbine is created by Prof James Blyth of Anderson’s College, Glasgow (now known as Strathclyde University).…
Continue Reading“Between 1970 and 2022, the combined emissions of the six common pollutants (PM2.5 and PM10, SO2, NOx, VOCs, CO and Pb) dropped by 78 percent. This progress occurred while U.S. economic indicators remain strong.” (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Our Nation’s Air Quality: Trends through 2022“)
Having failed to convince skeptics of climate alarm (the science is more settled toward the positives than the negatives of carbon dioxide [CO2]), and with no change in climate policy able to affect climate for decades (if ever), critics of fossil fuels turn to the known criteria air pollutants. The common refrain is that such emissions kill (five million annually), as if the sources of those emissions do not save lives—many more lives—by the minute of every day.…
Continue Reading“The infant industry argument is a smoke screen,” wrote Milton and Rose Friedman in their 1979 classic, Free to Choose. “The so-called infants never grow up.” And several years later, the two wrote: “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” [1]
Previous posts have documented the “permanent subsidies” of industrial wind power (14 extensions) and of solar power (15 extensions). [2] Add nuclear liability protection to this list, although the technology has long been declared safe by the industry and its proponents.
The Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act of 1957 became law as Section 170 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. It was supposed to be a ten-year window to allow commercial nuclear power to prove its economy and safety. But the so-called Price-Anderson Act–capping damage claims “to protect the public and to encourage the development of the atomic energy industry”–is still with us, some two-thirds of a century later.…
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