Dr. Larry Bell, a leading figure in space architecture and endowed professor at the University of Houston, is one of a small army of gifted people who have jumped disciplines to help even the climate debate against a locked-in academic establishment.
One of Bell’s recent columns deserves attention in reference to the current proposal by Dr. William Happer of the White House’s National Security Council to create an independent panel of outside experts to critically review the Fourth National Climate Assessment of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. (For the latest of the developing panel, see here.)
While Climategate has been the subject of several dedicated posts at MasterResource, Bell’s retelling is particularly relevant to what has been going on behind closed doors by a band of mostly deep-ecologist academic climatologists who work from an agenda of climate alarm and Malthusianism (a fear of population growth, technology, and affluence).…
In graphs and numbers, this article provides an overview of energy generation in the U.S., particularly electricity, during the last two decades. The data are extracted from the annual reports of the Department of Energy. For convenience, the various units used in the DOE tables are converted here to just one unit, the watt (W) with its billion multiple, the gigawatt (GW). Assigning the same unit for both generation and consumption enables straight-forward comparisons among efficiencies, capacity factors and the like.*
“Given the current productivity of wind and solar (W/S) employment, the presently available total work-force will be insufficient to manufacture, operate, maintain, tear down, dispose of, and erect all those millions of W&S plants that would be needed anew every 20 years.”
The Department of Energy (DOE) lists six energy sources as renewable: Wind, Solar, Hydro, Wood, Waste, and Geothermal.…
Continue Reading“The chief victims of the war against fossil fuels are the poorest citizens of the poorest nations. Developing countries need cheap energy.” – Stephen Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White. Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy, p. 237.
Stephen Moore, nominated last month by the Trump Administration for the Federal Reserve Board, has attracted criticism for his views on energy and climate from the usual sources (Grist, Huff Post, Desmog). In fact, poor and rich Americans and Left and Right politicos should support Moore’s realistic, utilitarian views. Dense mineral energies are for the masses in virtually all aspects of their daily lives.
Moore’s energy/climate views are well stated in his 300-page multidisciplinary primer (coauthored with Kathleen Hartnett White), Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy (Regnery: 2016).…
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