“I can find virtually no one—in government, in the environmental community, in business or in the press—who thinks that the Kyoto Protocol has even the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell of coming into effect in anything approaching its current form.  This is every bit as true internationally as it is in the United States.”

– Paul Portney [then president: Resources for the Future], “The Joy of Flexibility: U.S. Climate Policy in the Next Decade,” Keynote Address, Energy Information Administration Annual Outlook Conference, March 22, 1999, mimeo, p. 2.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress is increasingly fighting his own flank as a number of Left environmentalists are moderating their climate views in response to scientific and political realities. His enemies list grows and grows, the latest being Newsweek’s Jacob Weisberg, whom Romm challenges (and more!) …

Several reports (see here and here) and certain websites (here) allege that renewable technologies can meet our growing electricity needs and also meet stringent reduction targets for carbon dioxide. For example, Climate Progress, a website populated by Joseph Romm, an assistant secretary of energy during the Clinton administration, indicates that the answer to our growing electricity needs will come from energy efficiency (including cogeneration), wind power, concentrated solar power (CSP), and biomass co-firing, which taken together will meet a projected 1 percent annual growth rate in demand while also reducing carbon emissions.

These reports are in sharp contrast to forecasts produced by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), an independent agency of the U.S. Department of Energy.…

A key element of the current administration’s approach to recovery from our current economic and financial crises is a fundamental reorientation of the kinds of work performed in our economy. But a proposed shift to “green” jobs in the name of well-paying, high-impact employment that cannot be outsourced overlooks the essential nature of how human labor fosters economic well-being.

Simply put, the key to prosperity is high productivity per worker. There is simply no other way to be rich unless you sit on top of a gold mine (or oil well) and have few mouths that need to feed off that source of wealth.

Discarding the vain hope that a nation of 300 million can live well off a raw materials-based economy, we are left with productivity as the wellspring of affluence.…

[MasterResource editor] Clean Power Now VP Charles Kleekamp argued in favor of the proposed Cape Wind offshore wind project on economic grounds in guest editorials in the March 6 Cape Cod Times and March 15 Cape Cod Today. In letters-to-the-editor to the same papers (not published), Glenn Schleede challenges Kleekamp’s analysis and describes what information the developer of Cape Wind would need to provide to help determine what the ensuing cost of per kilowatt-hour is likely to be. Still, Massachusetts electric users can be expected to be paying more because such power is bring driven by state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard and the fact that electricity from wind is intermittent.

Mr. Schleede’s analysis follows.

Dear Editors:
Unfortunately, Mr. Kleekamp’s Opinion column in the March 6 issue of Cape Cod Times and March 15 issue of Cape Cod Today presents highly misleading information about the true cost of electricity that would be produced by the proposed Cape Wind project.…