“Your paper inspired me to re-review some of the congressional testimony of the renewable interests to see whether the litmus test of success was a cost target or more generally, competitiveness and market penetration. I think it is clearly the latter.”

“Imagine the coach of a football team justifying a perennial losing record by telling the administration that his players are getting bigger and faster …. Surely the administration would respond—’yes, we know the general trend and our participation in it. But we want real victories, not moral victories’.”

– Letter from Robert Bradley to Dallas Burtraw, January 1999.

It was arguably the very top intellectual research paper to justify past and continuing U.S. government support for renewable energies at the time of its publication (1999). I had a chance to rebut, working at Enron (as director, public policy analysis) that was a financial supporter of Resources for the Future (RFF), as well as a business leader in renewables.…

This essay, published twelve years ago in PERC Reports (“the magazine of free market environmentalism”), challenged the then-popular theory that oil production would inexorably reach a maximum and decline thereafter. What would become the U.S. and global shale oil and shale gas boom was just getting started.

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“This time it’s for real,” says the cover story of the June 2004 issue of National Geographic. “We’re at the beginning of the end of cheap oil.”

Books and articles written by geologists, environmentalists, and others regularly announce a new era of increasing oil scarcity. 1 Today’s resurrected hero of the depletionists is M. King Hubbert (1903-1989), a Shell Oil Company geologist who a half-century ago presented a bellshaped curve depicting oil production over time. But the theory of a little-known twentieth century economist, Erich Zimmermann, suggests this is unsound.…

“Shameless preplanned back-slapping accompanied a Paris climate accord that guaranteed nothing except continued high fossil fuel emissions.”

– James Hansen, “Wanning Workshop + Beijing Charts + Year-End Comments,” December 29, 2015

The cheering for the global climate change agreement had not even died down before its critics were hard at work pointing out the shortcomings of the plan. One of the most prominent critics was none other than former NASA scientist and Columbia University adjunct professor, James Hansen.

Mr. Hansen is popularly credited with being the “father of global warming,” since retitled “climate change.”  In 2013, Mr. Hansen retired from NASA and government service so he could become a climate change activist and stage protests, something banned for government workers.  His subsequent activism led to several arrests outside the White House as he illegally protested against mining and the Keystone XL pipeline. …

Environmental groups frequently claim that replacing fossil fuels with renewables will lead to more job opportunities. But according to a study that those same groups frequently cite, it’s not that simple.

According to research compiled by Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson, whose recent study outlines a “roadmap” for transitioning to 100% renewable energy, replacing fossil fuels with renewable technologies like wind and solar would actually cause a net loss of 1.2 million long-term jobs.

Jacobson’s data break out the number of long-term jobs that would be eliminated by sector. In transportation, more than 2.4 million men and women would be put out of work. Over 800,000 people working to produce oil and natural gas would lose their jobs. Nearly 90,000 jobs connected to coal mining would be wiped out.…