Ed. note: This post excerpts energy and climate material from the Media Balance Newsletter, a free fortnightly published by physicist John Droz Jr., founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions. The complete Newsletter for this post can be found here.

Renewables (General):
*** The New RPS: RELIABLE Portfolio Standard 
*** Level Playing Field
*** Future Grid: Really?
*** US Renewable Power Projects Slow Over High Costs and Community Opposition
Wind and Solar Projects Face Uphill Battles Despite Subsidy
Wind and solar energy ‘flatlines’ in frigid state at worst time
Major Biomass Facility to Close at Large Military Base, this Spring
Deep seabed mining plans pit renewable energy demand against ocean life

Wind Energy — Offshore:
*** Federal Agency Failing to Protect the Environment from Offshore Wind
*** Evidence says offshore wind development is killing lots of whales
The strange coincidence of the Offshore Wind Industry and 178 dead whales
Calls mount to stop offshore wind project as more whales wash up dead
Biden Hypocrisy Overflows, Harming Lobster Fishers and Right Whales
Killing Whales and Never Having to Say You’re Sorry!…

Ed. note: Julián Salazar Velásquez, geologist and petroleum engineer with a mulit-decade career in the Mexican and Venezuelan oil industries, is a leading educator and proponent of free market energy. He is author of numerous articles and Gerencia Integrada de Campos de Hidrocarburos” (2020), a primer on the oil industry value chain. His four-part world view began yesterday and continues in Part III, and Part IV.

Part II: Hydrocarbons: Curse or Blessing?

The anti-fossil-fuel crusade by environmental groups has attracted financing from Russia (Figure 3) to reduce competition from oil and gas in areas of Europe, Canada and the US, as reported in 2017 in National Review by Austin Yack. His investigation showed that in 2012, an attempt was made to grant Chevron a license in Bulgaria to explore and produce shale gas.…

Ed. note: Julián Salazar Velásquez is a geologist and petroleum engineer with a nearly 50-year career in the Mexican and Venezuelan oil industries. A leading educator and proponent of free market energy, he is author of numerous articles and Gerencia Integrada de Campos de Hidrocarburos (2020), a primer on the oil industry value chain. His four-part world view starts today and continues this week in Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

The current depiction of the oil and gas industry is not only incorrect but worrying. In the more than two years that I have been educating at conferences, in courses, in articles, and in my book—I have seen how unsound dogma threatens progress and prosperity in our countries.

Background

In December 2021 in Petroleum Magazine, I published “Energy Transition or Transgression?…

Ed. Note: In mid-2019, MasterResource published a post on a notable political capitalist in the history of the energy industry, the late James E. Rogers, longtime CEO of Duke Energy. With that company’s rolling blackouts (“load shedding”) over Christmas weekend for a half-million customers “for the first time in the utility’s history“, it is worth remembering the damage done to free markets and electric reliability by the political track chosen by one executive. (The post is reproduced below with minor edits.)

At 41 [in 1988], [James Rogers] was named CEO of PSI Energy Inc., a small, financially troubled Indiana utility. Breaking ranks with others in the electric-power industry, he supported legislation putting caps on sulfur-dioxide emissions. “Some of my guys thought I was drinking the environmental Kool-Aid,” he said later.