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 important articles in this issue are:

Wind Executive Interview: Wind Energy is Just a Subsidized Experiment

Levelized Cost of Electricity from Existing Generation Resources

Australia Finds Out that Wind Energy Doesn’t Really Work

LTE: Wind Project opposed for Many Good Reasons

Bats Save Billions in Pest Control

The Right to Know: Releasing Wind Turbine Bird & Bat Death Data

Are We Considering All the Costs For Wind Projects?…

“Government reports, writers of opinion pieces, and bloggers posting graphs purporting to show rising or record air temperatures or ocean heat, are misleading you. This is not actual raw data. It is plots of data that have been “adjusted” or “homogenized” (i.e., manipulated) by scientists – or it is output from models that are based on assumptions, many of them incorrect.”

My philosophy when I taught college was to show my students how to think – not what to think. As Socrates said, “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”

Data is king, I told my students, and models are only useful tools. Any model’s output or any theory needed to be examined and validated using data–and even then used with caution.

The great Nobel Laureate Physicist Richard Feynman taught students that if a theory or educated guess or hypothesis disagrees with experiment or data or experience,

it’s wrong.

“Those rejecting just and reasonable (i.e. ‘rule of law’) fossil-fuel decision-making in the name of ‘climate change, global warming, an ‘”abundance of caution'” or other alibis’, are either ignorant of the realities laid out above or treacherously aware of their effort to undermine the public interest in pursuit of their own accumulation of power.”

In a recent Calgary Herald editorial, Chris Nelson takes on the Quebec hypocrites and enviroactivists stonewalling TransCanada’s Energy East Pipeline Project, a 2,858-mile pipeline that would carry 1.1-million barrels/day of crude oil from Alberta and Saskatchewan to refineries in Eastern Canada. Part of the project converts TransCanada’s underutilized natural gas facilities to oil.

Here we stand: the powers out of Quebec have decided to block a market-supported oil pipeline to Alberta, and Edmonton could retaliate by banning Alberta from buying British Columbia’s excess electricity until the national government reverses its pipeline obstructionism.…

“Audubon’s equivocal policy on wind power ostensibly calls on wind energy developers to consider planning, siting, and operating wind farms in a manner that avoids bird carnage and supports ‘strong enforcement’ of laws protecting birds and wildlife. On the other hand, the same Audubon policy speaks about ‘species extinctions and other catastrophic effects of climate change’ and ‘pollution from fossil fuels’.”

The cover of the January-February 2016 issue of Audubon Magazine  proclaims: Arctic on the Edge: As global warming opens our most critical bird habitat, the world is closing in. In reality, it is the magazine’s writers and editors who have gone over the edge with their misleading reports on the Arctic.

This magazine is so awash in misstatements of fact and plain ignorance of history, science, and culture, that they must not go unchallenged – especially since they epitomize the false and misleading claims that have characterized far too much of the U.S.…