“And, frankly, libertarians like you who have supported Trump bear blame for this crap too. You have NO ground to stand on today having enabled this seditious shitty excuse for a human being….” (Steve Horwitz to Rob Bradley, Facebook, January 6, 2021)

“For me, one of the most tragic results of the Trump phenomenon has been to cause good, decent, reasonable classical liberals (libertarians, the good ones, not the zealots, you know what I mean) to yell at each other in anger and frustration.” (Peter Lewin, Facebook, January 8, 2021)

Amid the Capitol violence of Wednesday January 6, Peter Lewin, a notable Austrian-school economist and respected classical liberal, posted on Facebook about the “out of control zealots…. Mob Hysteria ready to explode….” Exchanges followed. I asked some rather civil questions including this one:

I’m not condoning the violence, just trying to put it in perspective…..

“Vineyard Wind has withdrawn its construction and operation plans from the federal permitting process, suddenly throwing the future into limbo for the international consortium that has been at the front of the pack in the race to build offshore wind farms off the American eastern seaboard.”

–  Noah Asimow | The Vineyard Gazette, December 14, 2020.

Part I yesterday reviewed the history and current status on three (of four) U.S. offshore wind projects: one proposed, one defunct, and one (barely) operational. They are:

• Icebreaker (Ohio), a proposed six-turbine project eight miles offshore, that is currently dealing with significant and perhaps fatal environmental permitting requirements.
• Block Island (Rhode Island), which has encountered significant operational problems, producing very low output and adding new costs.
• Cape Wind (Massachusetts), a defunct proposal to erect 130 turbines in Nantucket Sound.

“Soon enough, citizens and voters will wise up to the false promises and cronyism of political energy. MasterResource will be an intellectual resource to help win the day for the master resource and the human ingenuity behind it.”

There is life outside of energy research and related public policy. I discovered some of it during the last ten days with limited responsibilities on the avocation/vocation front. But it is time to re-engage–and take time to look back and forward.

A Look Back

MasterResource, “a free market energy blog,” just turned twelve years old. In our inaugural post (December 26, 2008), I wrote:

We are just getting started here, but some of us veterans of the energy debate from a private property, free-market perspective have teamed together to offer our thoughts on late breaking energy items.

[Editor Note: It was during the Thanksgiving weekend 11 years ago that the Climategate’s unsettling oeuvre was first being disseminated and analyzed. This post summarizes some remembrances from that period.]

“The conflict between the two ideas about how science should be conducted–a closed system dominated by gatekeepers, or a more chaotic but less hierarchical open system–is the dominant story of the [Climategate] emails over more than a decade.” – Fred Pearce, The Climate Files (2010), p. 13.

“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” – Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009.

Climategate lives in infamy. Then, and now, it is a case study of agendas driving science rather than science driving agendas.

A decade ago, climate alarmists and friends (including Dessler above) went into damage control.…