The Heritage Foundation (founded 1980) is a think-tank leader in the current debate over energy policy and related environmental issues. Heritage’s energy worldview is stated at their website:

Energy and environmental policy is a national priority. Lawmakers should implement a long-term plan that allows free markets to balance supply and demand, ensures reliable and competitively priced energy for the future, and creates incentives for responsible stewardship of the nation’s resources and environment.

A recent report, “President Obama’s Taxpayer-Based Green Energy Failures,” lists 34 examples of “faltering or bankrupt green-energy companies” (with * denoting companies that have filed for bankruptcy). The at-risk total is approximately $7.5 billion, of which $1.6  billion is in receivership.

The numbers will only get higher. Yesterday, it was reported that the Solyndra loss could be $849 million (not $535 million).…

[Ed. note: An important front in the energy-policy debate concerns the moral case for rich, dense, plentiful, reliable energy that is handmaiden to industrial society. In addition to the post below, see the contributions of Alex Epstein at this site.]

The duplicity and hypocrisy of environmental pressure groups seem to be matched only by their consummate skill at manipulating public opinion, amassing political power, securing taxpayer-funded government grants, and persuading people to send them money and invest in “ethical” stock funds.

In the annals of “green” campaigns, those against biotechnology, DDT and Alar are especially prominent. To those we should now add the well-orchestrated campaigns against Canadian oil sands and the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Background

Oil has been seeping out of Northern Alberta soils and river banks for millennia.…

“As the Democrats become more committed to, and defined by, a green agenda, and as they become dependent on money from high-tech venture capitalists and their lobbyists, it becomes harder to describe them as a party for the little guy — or liberalism as a philosophy of distributive justice.”

– Charles Lane, “Liberals Green-Energy Contradictions,” The Washington Post, October 15, 2012.

Governor Mitt Romney strongly supports North American energy independence as the foundation of renewed U.S. employment and prosperity. There is much needed to fill-in the blanks, but the challenger’s guiding philosophy promises real reform. Free-marketeers, playing defense for the last four years, and during a lot of the Bush Administration too, actually have a chance to play offense should Romney prevail.

President Obama is waging a three-front war on hydrocarbon fuels in the spirit of Thomas Malthus, while promoting a jobless recovery in the name of John Maynard Keynes.…

“While incremental improvements can be expected with biomass, wind and solar, what is needed for them to become viable is an order of magnitude increase in productivity…. As significant future energy sources these technologies are dead ends, which is why the government, and not the private sector, is funding them.”

When it comes to power, density is the key. Energy density. The reason that solar power, wind power, and ethanol are so expensive is that they are derived from very diffuse energy sources. It takes a lot of energy collectors such as solar cells, wind turbines, or corn stalks covering many square miles of land to produce the same amount of power that traditional coal, natural gas, or nuclear plants can on just a few acres.

Each of these alternative energy sources is based on mature technology.…