Peak-Oil Puff on Huff (David Hughes of the Post-Carbon Institute Tees Off)

By -- December 16, 2010 33 Comments

I am considered a leading critic of peak oil, the belief that oil production has peaked, is peaking, or will peak soon. I am a resource optimist in the Julian Simon tradition and believe that resourceship allows so-called depletable resources to expand, refuting the fixity/depletion mindset.

This said, I am empirically oriented. So let’s study and debate the facts, while remembering the record of peak-oil forecasts from the beginning to the present.

For my optimist/resourceship/expansionist position, I get slammed a good bit, such as by Joe Romm and by Gabriel Rotello at the Huffington Post (but also supported there by Raymond Learsay).  I mostly take the fuss, which is two parts emotionalism to one part intellectual argument.

But when David Hughes of the Post Carbon Institute published a piece calling a New York Times story “inaccurate, misleading and unhelpful ‘journalism’” I thought to add a comment.…

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Germany’s Offshore Wind: Wasted Resources, Environmental Blight

By Edgar Gaertner -- December 1, 2010 17 Comments

Thousands of bureaucrats are at another cushy climate confab–this time in Cancun–while Senators Bingaman, Brownback and Reid are contemplating how to ram a federal renewable energy quota through a lame-duck session. Their prospects are not good, which should give them more time to consider the experiences of Europe and windpower. The results of this experiment in energy coercion are humbling.

Germany, specifically, is in the throes of a windpower boondoggle that should be heard the world over. The general lesson is that energy forcing brings with it technological risk that must be factored into the public policy equation.

A North Sea Boondoggle

Barely two months after the inauguration ceremony for Germany’s first pilot offshore wind farm, “Alpha Ventus” in the North Sea, all six of the newly installed wind turbines were completely idle, due to gearbox damage.…

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Bill Gates: Energy Visionary? (energy Manhattan project, yet again)

By -- June 18, 2010 16 Comments

“If America can put a man on the moon, why should we stay in servitude to the first and second laws of thermodynamics? What we plainly need is a Manhattan Project–like the one that gave us the atomic bomb but not like the one that narrowly missed finding a cure for cancer.”

– Paul Samuelson, “Tragicomedy of the Energy Crisis,” Newsweek, July 2, 1979, p. 62.

“A group of industry leaders, including Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and General Electric boss Jeff Immelt, stepped up calls for a Manhattan project for low carbon energy last week urging the US government to significantly increase investment in energy research and development.”

– Danny Bradbury, “Gates and Co Demand Manhattan Project for Energy.” BusinessGreen.com, June 14, 2010.

Just as as the polls start finding that nobody thinks global warming matters much, and just as hockey stick predictions of catastrophe fall apart in a scientific scandal, guess who turns up at the White House?…

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The Bear Growls a Bit More Softly Now: New Adventures in Pipelinestan

By Donald Hertzmark -- May 7, 2010 No Comments

In the wake of the BP well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico and the attempted terrorist bombing of New York’s Times Square, the broadcast media have been full of the sackcloth and ashes crowd pronouncing once more the end of the hydrocarbon era and the vital need for the U.S. to “break our oil addiction” ASAP.

Their soundbites start with a half-truth and end with a fallacy.  We are told that “60 percent of U.S. energy supplies still come from oil and gas,” with the implication that (i) all of that is imported; and (ii) the pittance that we produce domestically all comes from offshore facilities.

 It is true that 60 percent (actually 62.5%) of our energy comes from oil and gas.  But the portion that comes from natural gas, about 24% of total U.S.…

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Green Jobs: The Last Redoubt (invoking military images of us-versus-them)

By Donald Hertzmark -- February 19, 2010 6 Comments Continue Reading

The Left, Nuclear Power, and Copenhagen: Rejecting the Viable

By Robert Bryce -- December 10, 2009 11 Comments Continue Reading

Dear Tom Friedman: Don’t Want You to Die Off … Just Get Well!

By Donald Hertzmark -- November 21, 2009 7 Comments Continue Reading

The United States is the World’s True Energy Superpower

By Donald Hertzmark -- September 18, 2009 9 Comments Continue Reading

Where is the Real Dr. Chu, Mr. President? (Climate alarmism – nuclear = not much on the supply side)

By Donald Hertzmark -- July 17, 2009 5 Comments Continue Reading

Energy Exceptionalism: Promises Made, Promises Kept (so far, so good)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- January 28, 2025 No Comments Continue Reading