“What many environmentalists seem incapable of understanding is that resources are created. After all, crude oil is just sludge until you get it out of the ground and figure out how to use it as an energy source.”

“This Earth Day, we should all give two green thumbs up for human freedom and innovation.”

There is a certain fringe of the environmentalist movement whose members have almost nothing good to say about their fellow men and women. If not for humans, they sometimes explicitly argue, the Earth would be a wonderful place. The lion might not lie down with the lamb, but at least “nature” would be allowed to run its course unobstructed by humankind—which in their reckoning is somehow not a part of nature.

Admittedly, humans have a particular nature that sets them apart from the rest of the fauna on this planet.…

“In light of adjustments to global temperature data that allowed some reporters to cite 2014 as the warmest year in recorded history, it is fitting reporter Seth Borenstein be nominated for the inaugural Brian Williams Award For Science Reporting.”

On January 16, 2015, Associated Press Science Writer Seth Borenstein published “The heat is on; NOAA, NASA say 2014 warmest year on record.” Within days of this publication information was cited that NASA and NOAA data showed 2014 global temperatures weren’t statistically different from the years 2005 and 2010.

The land surface temperature data used by NOAA and NASA is subject to errors in measurements at temperature stations that were rural 100 years ago and are now in urban areas due to population growth. This is called the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE), which results in local temperature increases due to accumulations of concrete and asphalt.…

“Each of the complex climate models used by the IPCC grossly overstates the amount of warming the planet has experienced during the past 120 or so years. In addition, based on the idea that temperatures should rise right along with CO₂ emissions, these models have missed the entire 18+ year hiatus in rising temperatures.”

In early January, the noted science journal Science Bulletin published a paper by Lord Christopher Monckton; Astrophysicist Willie Soon, Ph.D.: climatologist and geologist David Legates, Ph.D.; and statistician William Briggs, “Why Models Run Hot: Results from an Irreducibly Simple Climate Model,” which introduced a new, simple model of the climate’s response to adding CO₂ to the atmosphere.  Their model outperformed the complex climate models used by the IPCC to project future temperatures and temperature trends.…

Economic conservation of energy consists of voluntary actions and investments that make sense to the decision-maker in a free-market setting. Political conservation is  government-directed energy reduction measures. The later, conservationism, is energy savings for its own sake through monopolistic coercion or special favor (tax beak, crony regulation, or public check).

Demand-Side Management (DSM) programs by electric utilities are a major element of conservationism. Those who support reasonable efficiency and the elimination of waste should let the energy-efficiency politicos have the DSM term and use other words to describe what is favored.

DSM rose to regulatory prominence during the late 1980’s following the disastrous nuclear generation construction programs of the electric utilities. The confidence of the utility industry and its regulators in high-cost building programs shaken, they listened to new other approaches to meet future energy demand.…