“The economy is not recovering…. It’s now impossible to deny the obvious, which is that we are not now and have never been on the road to recovery.”

– Paul Krugman, “The Wrong Worries,” New York Times, August 5, 2011, p. A21.

Federal energy policy is being driven by the failure of neo-Keynesian economic policy.

Stimulus spending was supposed to end the Great Recession and transform tax expenditure into additional tax revenues. Instead, we are left with both recession and broke government. Obama borrowed from the future and made the present worse. George W. did his share too.

Three Strikes: Is Keynesianism Finally Out?

Keynesian economics failed during the Great Depression (will more textbooks now admit it?). The activist approach of Herbert Hoover (the first New Dealer, according to Murray Rothbard) used the powers of government to slow the liquidation of unsound investments, narrow profit opportunities, injure international trade, and block employment.…

Across the European Union, solar energy is facing tough love conditions as its feed-in-tariffs (FiT) face déjà vu in another round of reduction.

Like in the classic Tale of Two Cities, the world of solar energy today seems filled with the excitement of seeing its revolutionary potential realized by rapid growth, while fearful that falling prices, changing feed in tariff subsidies and looming government deficits will overwhelm it first.

There is no denying solar energy’s promise and potential.  Its rapid growth is a worldwide phenomenon.  Lately I have been catching up on the news reports and changing solar situation in Europe.  A recent report prepared by Ernst & Young for UK’s Solar Trade Association confirmed what we already knew that solar PV prices are falling so fast that by 2013 they will be half of what they cost in 2009.…

“I wrote this book because the rising cost of energy is an increasingly important feature of the political landscape, as it massively affects the cost of living for families across Britain. Excessive green taxes make everything from driving to work to taking a well-earned holiday more expensive and make it a lot harder for manufacturers to compete and keep employing people here in Britain.

Motorists are particularly hard hit and unfairly penalized well beyond the cost of maintain the roads and the environmental harms their emissions create. The Government need to give families a better deal and cut unfair green taxes.”

– Matthew Sinclair, Press Release, Let Them Eat Carbon (London: TaxPayers Alliance: August 2011)

Matthew Sinclair, director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, has penned an educational tract to get his fellow countrymen to reconsider what in their good graces has been accepted as sort of a public duty–to buy into climate/energy alarmism and to do their fair share.…

Joke: ‘When is an environmentalist not an environmentalist? …. When it comes to windpower.’

[This press release from August 10th is reproduced in its entirety. A description of the sponsoring organizations follows.]

The North-American Platform Against Windpower (NA-PAW) objects to the passing of the “Power NY Act” on August 8th. Also known as “Article X”, this law reverses decades of democratic rights in New York State.

Municipalities no longer have the power to veto harmful projects targeting their constituencies. Albany bureaucrats will decide where energy and other industrial projects are to be built, and the people will have to bite the bullet.

Says Sherri Lange, NA-PAW’s CEO: “I believe New Yorkers won’t take it lying down. I have faith in the North American spirit: we won’t let politicians take away our freedoms.”…