MasterResource, the world’s premier free-market energy blog, began the day after Christmas and is seven months old. Views of 50,000 in our first quarter have been followed by 100,000 in the second quarter. Viewership near one thousand per day is not bad for a scholarly start-up–and much growth potential remains.

Our Model

We are a group blog on the very important and wide topic of energy, including climate change, which is all about energy. Our bloggers come from a variety of institutions, nonprofit and for-profit. We have backgrounds in political economy, economics, environmental studies, philosophy, and engineering. We are thinker-doers who are open-minded and part of a challenge culture. No smartest-guys-in-the-room problem here.

In the increasingly crowded blogosphere, there will be a flight to quality to group blogs that have a clear theme.…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of Waterkeeper Alliance, posits in the Financial Times (July 19) that converting our fleet of coal-fired power plants to natural gas could be accomplished “practically overnight” and will have the effect of “jump-starting our economy….without the expense of building new power plants.” Thus did Kennedy express his new-found love of natural gas: It’s our “bridge fuel to the ‘new’ energy economy.” (Where have we heard that before–wasn’t that Enron’s tag line decade or two ago?)

Yet Kennedy’s proposal ignores the extremely high cost of fuel conversion (upwards of $100 million for a medium-size coal plant) and the added fuel cost to burn gas. He seriously mischaracterizes how an electricity market operates. And Joe Romm (Climate Progress) had added to the confusion by calling Kennedy’s proposal a “game changer.”…

In quick succession, the Obama administration has dealt a near-death blow to new civilian nuclear reactors in the U.S.

First, the Yucca Mountain Project, a waste storage facility in Nevada, was “zeroed-out” of the 2009 budget. Second, the administration has just ended U.S. participation in a new nuclear fuel recycling project, one that would extract more energy from existing fission energy sources, and reduce sharply the high level nuclear waste from nuclear power.

Presiding over both of these decisions–that effectively terminate the feasibility of new nuclear power plants for the U.S.–is Dr. Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, Nobel Laureate in Physics, and former director of the Lawrence Berkeley Energy Laboratory.

In contrast to the crowing of Senator Harry Reid about “killing” the Yucca Mountain Waste storage project, Dr. Chu described nuclear fuel recycling as an essential element of nuclear power for the U.S.,…

“If there is one thing I have been impressed with over the last decades, it is that when the environmental community defines a number one priority, something happens. Not always something good—but something.”1

Dr. Kenneth L. Lay, Chairman, Enron Corporation, June 1997 (1)

Who was the late Ken Lay, the architect and chairman of Enron throughout its 16-year history? All parties to the current legislative debate on a CO2 cap-and-trade bill should know. After all, Lay’s tireless efforts to promote CO2 regulation and enact renewable energy quotas make him a father figure for HR 2354, the Waxman-Markey climate bill, what I have called the Enron Revitalization Act of 2009.

In his lifetime, Lay did not win CO2 regulation, but he got a very damaging renewable energy mandate passed in his home state of Texas.…