“Mr. Pickens’s original vision had something for everyone. First he would build a wind farm in Texas with 2,700 turbines costing upward of $10 billion. That would pump power into the national grid, allowing huge amounts of natural gas to be diverted from power plants to newly equipped cars and trucks. The result, he promised, would be a sharp reduction in the country’s dependence on Middle East crude.”
“‘This to me is like a war without guns,’ says Mr. Pickens….”
– Neil King, Pickens’s Windmills Tilt Against Market Realities, Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2009.
A decade ago, a rent-seeking, vainglorious Texas oil man named T. Boone Pickens spent tens of millions of dollars to promote what today might be called the Little Green Deal. It was nicely summarized in the Wall Street Journal at the time by Neil King, Pickens’s Windmills Tilt Against Market Realities.…
Continue Reading“Earth stewardship isn’t easy. Sometimes we make the wrong decisions. Sometimes whatever we do has both positive and negative consequences. One wrong decision is The Ocean Cleanup (TOC) project.”
“TOC’s plan … is not manual plastic removal, which allows most creatures to escape. It will instead use purse seines with a minimum mesh size of ⅛ inch (3 mm), capable of trapping microplastics—but also an untold number and variety of sea creatures.”
On a recent boating adventure in the open Pacific, my friends and I came across a section of abandoned fishing net. My first thought was, “Let’s remove it.”
But as I started to pull the net in, I saw a huge mahi-mahi resting in its shade. Also known as dorado or dolphinfish, the mahi-mahi (spooked by my activity) disappeared in a flash.…
Continue Reading“With a clean electricity system comes opportunities to reduce fossil fuel usage in these sectors: for example, electric vehicles displace petroleum use and electric heat pumps avoid the use of natural gas and oil for space and water heating in buildings.”
– The While House, United States Mid-Century Strategy for Deep Decarbonization, (November 2016)
“Assuming we all want to avoid an American repeat of the French “Mouvement des gilets jaunes” (yellow vest movement) the economic realities of ‘deep decarbonization’ through ‘electrification’ must be a priority for public debate and discussion.” (below)
As Senator Everett Dirksen is credited with saying: “A million here, a million there, and pretty soon we’re talking real money.” Not much has changed, except for inflation. Now it’s more like $40 million here and $50 million there.…
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