“As early as the third page of the draft agreement is the acknowledgment that its CO2 target won’t keep the global temperate rise below 2 deg C, the level that was once set as the critical safe limit.”
– Professor Paul Beckwith (University of Ottowa) et al., Letter to The Independent, January 2016.
James Hansen struck first, predicting that the Paris accord would be a farce–then following up by labeling the agreement “bullshit.” Although he cannot seem to question his high-climate-sensitivity science conclusion, Hansen had done the math and knows that only a very high carbon tax and rush to nuclear power can reduce CO2 emissions meaningfully, not paper promises and renewable-energy subsidies.
Now comes a group of scientists arguing that since manmade greenhouse gas emissions are not going to be appreciably reduced in the next years and decades, world governments must embark on a crash course to reverse engineer the planet (a new round of public funding for sure).…
Continue ReadingThis essay, published twelve years ago in PERC Reports (“the magazine of free market environmentalism”), challenged the then-popular theory that oil production would inexorably reach a maximum and decline thereafter. What would become the U.S. and global shale oil and shale gas boom was just getting started.
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“This time it’s for real,” says the cover story of the June 2004 issue of National Geographic. “We’re at the beginning of the end of cheap oil.”
Books and articles written by geologists, environmentalists, and others regularly announce a new era of increasing oil scarcity. 1 Today’s resurrected hero of the depletionists is M. King Hubbert (1903-1989), a Shell Oil Company geologist who a half-century ago presented a bellshaped curve depicting oil production over time. But the theory of a little-known twentieth century economist, Erich Zimmermann, suggests this is unsound.…
Continue Reading“If the industry’s plans go unchallenged and with 280 massive turbines planned for Altamont, the turbine rotor sweep will increase 2-3 times when calculated in square meters. Calculated in cubic meters, the blade sweep will increase by as much as 5 times.”
“Our supposed regulators and wildlife protection services have looked the other way for 30 years, while the industry produced reams of bogus “studies” designed to justify its existence and hide the death tolls.”
The next hearing on expanding wind energy production at the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area in California is set for January 14, 2016. “Depending on final turbine selection, micro-siting and other considerations, a capacity of 54 MW is still expected to be yielded,” says an Alameda County announcement about enormous new Siemens turbines being installed there.…
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