“No electric car since 1902, regardless of battery or drive train, had been able to compete effectively against its contemporary internal combustion counterpart.”
– David Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and The Burden of History (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 203.
Energy history takes the wind out of the sails of the advocates of forced energy transformation. Proponents of government- enabled renewable energies must contend with the fact that for most of mankind’s (impoverished) history, the market share of biomass, wind, solar, and falling water was 100 percent. (The carbon-based energy era is only a couple of hundred years old.)
And proponents of government-enabled electric vehicles (not golf carts) must know that their technology was beat fair and square than a century ago.
Here are some quotations on the rise and fall of EVs (or EEVs–emission elsewhere vehicles).…
Continue Reading“Michael Goggin says that attacking the validity of the CEMS data is a sure sign of desperation. But it can be argued that any possible desperation is on the other side.”
In my 2014 post Where Wind Studies Go Wrong: Cullen in AEJ (Part II) , Michael Goggin of the Amercian Wind Energy Association (AWEA) made a comment that recently came to my attention, which deserves a rebuttal despite the lapse of time. My 2014 post critiqued a paper by Joseph Cullen, Measuring the Environmental Benefits of Wind-Generated Electricity.
In summary, Goggin’s points were as follows:
“IER’s philosophy and research reflects a number of academic traditions, from natural-rights philosophy to market-process economics to Public Choice. We are heavily influenced by the lessons of history, given the extensive role of government intervention in energy markets (remember, for example, the 1970s energy crisis?). We are not a public relations firm but one based on classical liberalism, better known today as libertarianism.”
Former Obama advisor and Democratic operative David Axelrod recently tweeted: “Donald Trump cites energy analysis from The Institute for Energy Research, notorious as the climate change-denying arm of the oil industry.” In fact, Trump cited an IER-sponsored study that predicted that legalizing energy production on federal domains could result in a half-million well-paying jobs annually and economic benefits of more than $100 billion annually.
What was the study that Trump cited and Axelrod decried?…
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