Climategate Did Not Begin With Climate (Remembering Julian Simon and the storied intolerance of neo-Malthusians)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 8, 2009 9 Comments

A powerful argument against climate alarmism is the failed worldview of modern neo-Malthusianism, which has promoted fear after fear with an intolerant, smartest-guys-in-the-room mentality. Remember the “population bomb” where many millions would die in food riots? Well, obesity turned out to be the real problem.

Remember the Club of Rome’s resource scare? In 1972, 57 predictions of exhaustion were made regarding 19 different minerals. All either have been falsified or will be.

Remember the global-cooling scare promoted by, among others, the Obama administration’s science czar, John Holdren? (Yes, global cooling was a big deal, although it was not a “consensus.”)

And all of the above doom merchants were uber-confident and still are loath to admit they were ever wrong. Holdren, for example, is sticking to his prediction that as many as one billion people could die by 2020 from (man-made) climate change.…

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Power Politics: Enron Lives! (From Ken Lay’s “natural gas standard” to cap & trade today)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 5, 2009 2 Comments

Editor Note: This commentary is reproduced, with slight revision, from the December 2009 issue of POWER magazine.

As director of public policy analysis in my last seven years at Enron, I participated in many legislative and regulatory debates involving electricity, although the public policy thrust of the company was the opposite of what I personally believed was good social policy.

While I favored free markets, the business model of Ken Lay (a PhD economist with years of Washington regulatory experience) centered on special government favor. Enron, for example, had seven profit centers geared to government pricing/rationing of carbon dioxide (CO 2) emissions. And in the 1990s, the company was squarely behind a Btu tax. Today, Enron would be pushing cap and trade and a federal renewables mandate–and a lot of mandated energy efficiency with its profit centers in mind.…

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Wind Integration: Incremental Emissions from Back-Up Generation Cycling (Part III – Response to Comments)

By Kent Hawkins -- December 4, 2009 11 Comments

Posts at Knowledge Problem acknowledge the range of results from Part I and Part II in my series; Katzenstein and Apt; and an article by Michael Milligan et al, Wind Power Myths Debunked, but attribute much of the differences to characteristics of the power system to which wind power is added.

However, although results will vary by jurisdiction, the differences I reported are not derived from this consideration but from general issues with respect to wind power integration. Milligan claims low reductions from the theoretical maximum (negligible to 7 per cent), apparently from Gross et al’s literature review, but this does not survive critical assessment.

The work of Katzenstein and Apt is cited in the bibliography to Part I, even though they show that as much as 75–80 per cent of the CO2 emissions reductions presently assumed by policy makers is realized.…

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A Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism, Redux?

By Kenneth P. Green -- November 27, 2009 6 Comments

Editor Note: In our ‘best of MasterResource’ weekend series, we are pleased to reprint the September 30th post by Ken Green in light of the stalemate of U.S. climate legislation for 2009. Obviously, the onset of Climategate will only reinforce a worst-case scenario for climate alarmism politics.

Desperation is setting in among climate alarmists who by their own math can see that the window is rapidly closing on “saving the planet.”

James Hansen, for instance, said three years ago in the New York Review of Books: “We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.” That was also Al Gore’s estimate in “An Inconvenient Truth.” But the time has been ticking away, and it’s increasingly obvious that the Gore/Hansen “wrenching transformation” of the U.S.…

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Dear Tom Friedman: Don’t Want You to Die Off … Just Get Well!

By Donald Hertzmark -- November 21, 2009 7 Comments Continue Reading

High Capital Costs Plague Solar (RPS mandates, cost dilution via energy mixing required) Part III

By Robert Peltier -- November 19, 2009 6 Comments Continue Reading

Wind Integration: Incremental Emissions from Back-Up Generation Cycling (Part II)

By Kent Hawkins -- November 16, 2009 7 Comments Continue Reading

“Industrial Wind Power in Maine’s Mountains is Bad Policy” (Testimony of Citizens Task Force on Wind Power)

By Brad Blake -- November 14, 2009 23 Comments Continue Reading

Wind Integration: Incremental Emissions from Back-Up Generation Cycling (Part I: A Framework and Calculator)

By Kent Hawkins -- November 13, 2009 53 Comments Continue Reading

Houston Chronicle: Former Environmental Writer Documents Origins of Left/Alarmist Bias at the Paper

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- November 12, 2009 4 Comments Continue Reading