“IER’s philosophy and research reflects a number of academic traditions, from natural-rights philosophy to market-process economics to Public Choice. We are heavily influenced by the lessons of history, given the extensive role of government intervention in energy markets (remember, for example, the 1970s energy crisis?). We are not a public relations firm but one based on classical liberalism, better known today as libertarianism.”

Former Obama advisor and Democratic operative David Axelrod recently tweeted: “Donald Trump cites energy analysis from The Institute for Energy Research, notorious as the climate change-denying arm of the oil industry.” In fact, Trump cited an IER-sponsored study that predicted that legalizing energy production on federal domains could result in a half-million well-paying jobs annually and economic benefits of more than $100 billion annually.

What was the study that Trump cited and Axelrod decried?…

“Artificial reliance on unconventional energies is problematic outside niche applications. Politically favored renewable energies for generating electricity are expensive and supply constrained and introduce their own environmental issues. Alternative vehicular technologies are, at best, decades away from mass commercialization. Meanwhile, natural gas and reformulated gasoline are setting a torrid competitive pace in the electricity and transportation markets, respectively.” (1999)

Advocates of energy reality and a consumer-driven, taxpayer-neutral energy industry have reason to be discouraged. Arguments against government intervention in energy market from decades ago are still valid if not more true today.

Peak oil … Energy security … Pollution reductions… Global lukewarming. Game, set, match fossil fuels. Game over for government subsidized wind power, solar power, ethanol, and electric vehicles.

But the advocates of forced (government) eco-energy transformation march on.

A theme at MasterResource, now in its eighth year, has been the false arguments and predictions of the energy interventionists, and the still-true, come-true arguments of the freedom school.…

The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy and environmental policies. Our premise is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science (please consult WiseEnergy.org for more information).

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every three weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and the environment. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

Some of the more important articles in this issue are:

Wind Executive Interview: Wind Energy is Just a Subsidized Experiment

Levelized Cost of Electricity from Existing Generation Resources

Australia Finds Out that Wind Energy Doesn’t Really Work

LTE: Wind Project opposed for Many Good Reasons

Bats Save Billions in Pest Control

The Right to Know: Releasing Wind Turbine Bird & Bat Death Data

Are We Considering All the Costs For Wind Projects?…

“Perhaps the most distressing characteristic displayed by the pushers of soft energy was the intellectual poverty of their grand designs, their impatient dismissal of all criticism, their arrogant insistence on the infallible orthodoxy of their normative visions.”

“There is little doubt about the origins and the real message of soft energy dogma: the roots are in the muddled revolts of young Americans in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the goal is a social transformation rather than simply a provision of energy. The latter fact explains the widespread appeal of soft energy sources among zealous would-be reformers of Western ways.” 

Vaclav Smil is one of the leading energy scholars of our day. He has, time and again, tried to inject energy reality into energy fantasy. Some of his previous posts at MasterResource (see here) include ‘The Limits of Energy Innovation’: Timeless Insight from Vaclav Smil and the five-part Power Density Primer.…