“The Master Resource people are whores of the fossil fuel industry. (Yes, that certainly includes you.)”

– David Appell (@davidappell) | March 5, 2014 at 10:33 pm |

Judith Curry at Climate, Etc. posted about a new analysis by Nic Lewis and Marcel Crok, “A sensitive matter:  How the IPCC buried evidence showing good news about global warming” (Global Warming Policy Foundation: press release here; short version here), for which she wrote an introduction (see Appendix B below).

Several hundred comments followed. A critical, emotive thread of comments toward Lewis/Crok, and by implication Curry, was coming from David Appell, a highly credentialed journalist with a widely read blog, Quark Soup, that focuses on climate issues from an alarmist perspective.

I noticed this comment from Dr. Appell in response to pokerguy (aka al neipris) | March 5, 2014 at 7:16 pm who argued that at lower climate sensitivity, the external effects would “more likely … be overwhelmingly positive in its effect.”…

“Today, many governments give special treatment to a favored few businesses that eagerly accept those favors. This is the essence of cronyism…. One obvious example of this involves wind farms. Most cannot turn a profit without the costly subsidies the government provides.”

– Charles G. Koch, “The Importance of Economic Freedom.” August 17, 2012.

William Simon, the top energy regulator in the Nixon’s Federal Energy Administration, was surprised. Oil company head after head was visiting his office to demand this or that to alleviate their shortages of oil or get more entitlements credit for their refineries. But Koch Industries had come by to just ask the federal government to leave them alone—to allow price signals to allocate crude oil and petroleum products. It was a meeting that Simon would not forget.…

[Editor’s note: From time to time MasterResource will interview leading scholars in the free-market energy and environmental tradition. This is our first interview.]

MR: Ken, describe your current position at the Fraser Institute in Canada.

KG: I am Senior Director of Fraser’s Centre for Natural Resources, which studies public policy involving natural resource management. Primarily, we study mining and energy policy, but there are elements of environmental and even agricultural policy that fall under the aegis of my Center.

MR: What is the mission of Fraser?

KG: The informal way I describe our mission is that we study public policy and educate Canadians (and global audiences as well) about the impact that public policy choices have on people’s lives.

Those impacts might be at the level of the individual, where people want to see how schools rank in order to pick a school for their children; the impacts might be at the household level where we show people what a proposed or existing public policy might cost their household on an annual basis; they might be the effects a policy will have on their provincial competitiveness or fiscal stability; and it might be at the global level where we rank the countries of the world on economic freedom, or the hospitality of global jurisdictions to mining investment.…

The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science. It’s all spelled out at WiseEnergy.org, which is a wealth of energy and environmental resources.

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every 3 weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and environmental matters. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

—————————

Greed Energy Economics:

The Levelized Cost of Electric Generation

Electricity Prices Skyrocketing In Largest Wind Power States

High Renewable Energy Costs Damage the German Economy

Merkel Advisers Urge Germany to End Clean-Energy Subsidy Program

Exelon may shut down nuclear plants due to wind subsidies

UK wind project earnings hit by plans to freeze carbon tax

Spain plans to end all pre-2004 wind subsidies

Turbine Health Matters:

A new Innovative infrasound measuring device available

Dr.…