“The private sector will never do the amount of fundamental research that society’s interests require because you cannot tell in advance the nature of fundamental research…. The companies can’t tell whether there’ll ever be any return.”
– John Holdren, December 2017 Interview.
Less than one year ago, John Holdren, Obama’s beginning-to-end science adviser, and now Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, spoke of his concerns about Trump energy policy in a Climate One podcast from San Francisco.
Holdren quotations are below in red, followed by my rebuttal comments indented in black (subtitles added):
Government R&D as Savior
Holdren: “Well I think the biggest damage that the Trump administration is doing is first of all reducing or proposing to reduce very drastically investments in clean and efficient energy research and development by the government.…
Continue Reading“The impact of ethane is perhaps the most remarkable development in the remarkable story of the shale revolution. Less than three years ago, ethane was a largely unwanted byproduct of oil and gas drilling …. But today, ethane is feedstock for nearly half of U.S. plastics production and a valuable export to chemical companies around the world.”
– Jordan Blum, “How the Ethane Molecule Changes the Gulf Coast — and the World,” Houston Chronicle, September 15, 2018.
“Resources are highly dynamic functional concepts; they are not, they become, they evolve out of the triune interaction of nature, man, and culture, in which nature sets outer limits, but man and culture are largely responsible for the portion of physical totality that is made available for human use.”
– Erich Zimmermann, resource economist (1951) [1]
Methane.…
Continue Reading“The US Treasury estimates the PTC will cost taxpayers $40.12 billion in the period from 2018–2027, making it, by far, the most expensive energy subsidy under current tax law.”
“After billions in public hand-outs, the wind industry has never been able to stand on its own and there’s no reason to believe this will change. Tax credits are now a required component of the industry’s economics. The outcome of an expired PTC is evident: wind installations will crawl to a near stop.”
Just twelve months after the PTC phase-out [1] went into effect, the wind industry boasted that thousands of new megawatts were under construction or in advanced stages of development. Confirming specifics is challenging since the industry tends to bloviate, but reports put the number of safe-harbored turbines between 30 and 70 thousand megawatts with the majority expected to be in service before the end of 2020.…
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