The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy and environmental policies. Our premise is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science (please consult WiseEnergy.org for more information).

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every three weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and the environment. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

Some of the more insightful articles in this issue are:

Position of Poland’s National Institute of Public on Industrial Wind

Wind Energy Sector Gets $176 Billion Worth of Crony Capitalism

Despite Huge Investments, Renewable Energy Isn’t Winning

Turbine Bat Killings Continue Unabated

Multiple Mortality Events in Bats: a Global Review

The UK’s SMR Competition

Denmark Cancels All Coastal Wind Projects

Wind Turbines Threaten Space Research

Peer-Reviewed Study: CO2 Cuts Could Impoverish the World

Peer-Reviewed Study: Positive Impact of Human CO2 Emissions

1500 Scientists Lift the Lid on Reproducibility

Global Warming Alarmists—You’re Doing it Wrong

Rebutting Climate Alarmism with Simple Facts

Science on the Verge

The Watermelons Are Coming

Greed Energy Economics:

Wind Energy Sector Gets $176 Billion Worth of Crony Capitalism

Despite Huge Investments, Renewable Energy Isn’t Winning

US Senate Finance Committee Energy Hearing Testimony

The revealing numbers on solar employment in the USA

DOE Withdraws $40 Million from VA Offshore Wind Project

Germany Moves to Slow its Out-of-Control Energiewende

Wind Energy PILOT Programs are a Shell Game

Renewable Energy Health Matters:

VT Gov vetoes wind energy bill designed to provide health protections

Position of Poland’s National Institute of Public on industrial wind

Poland Adopts 10x Setback Rule for Wind Turbines

7 Short Videos to Clear Up Myths about Air Pollution

Renewable Energy Destroying Ecosystems:

Turbine Bat Killings Continue Unabated

Multiple mortality events in bats: a global review

Turtles Topple Turbines

Open for Comments: NOAA’s Draft of Ocean Noise Rules

Miscellaneous Energy News:

Wind Turbines Threaten Space Research

The UK’s SMR Competition

Denmark Cancels All Coastal Wind Projects

Study: Empirically-constrained climate sensitivity and the social cost of carbon

Study: Solar PV is a net energy loser

Who Wants Wind Turbines?…

Twenty years ago, Rob Bradley, then president and now CEO of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), published a two-volume, two-thousand-page history of hydrocarbon regulation, legislation, economics, and politics from the mid-1800s to the mid-1980s. Titled Oil, Gas & Government: The U.S. Experience, Bradley’s treatise puts many of today’s energy issues in historical context.

On April 1, 1996, I wrote about the book in the newsletter I founded and edited, Natural Gas Week. I started my column, dubbed Perspective, by quoting philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Today, 20 years later, I would urge current legislators and regulators to consider the main takeaways of Bradley’s book before casting another vote or initialing another regulatory memo.

In his book, Bradley said that political motivations for government intervention are “narrow and self-interested, not necessarily in the common good and not necessarily representative of the citizenry.”…

“Expanding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve would be throwing good money after bad. Instead of remaining a valuable asset mired in the political swamp, the SPR can be turned into an entrepreneurial asset. The reserve can be privatized by selling off either the entire operation or its individual parts.” – RLB (1991)

Good analysis on empirical matters, even from long ago (a quarter-century in this case) must stand the test of time.

It is regular fare at MasterResource to document the false claims of energy Malthusians (neo-Malthusians) from the 1970s until the present (now in their fifth decade!). And from time to time, MasterResource produces analyses from the past by free-market scholars for their relevancy and accuracy for current energy debates.

The example below, from 1991, is a quarter-century old. It concerns the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), a forgotten, obsolete oil stockpile that could disappear tomorrow and not be noticed by the market.…

“Falling commodity prices in general are a good thing in a free market because, as economist Ludwig von Mises emphasized, the sole end of production is consumption. Consumption first, production second. Also the US is a net importer of both oil and natural gas, which means we consume more than we produce. So provincially speaking, the US gains more than it loses from well-to-pump or well-to-burner-tip price drops.”

Business consultant Carlos Lara and I produce a monthly financial publication, the Lara-Murphy Report, which highlights the Austrian School of economics in both academia and the financial markets. The January 2016 issue interviewed Rob Bradley of Houston, Texas, who was trained in Austrian-school economics and is a longtime historian of oil markets. This interview is reproduced below.

Robert L. Bradley Jr. is the founder and chief executive officer of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a 501(c)3 educational foundation with offices in Houston, Texas, and Washington, D.C.…