“For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels.”
– Vaclav Smil, “What I See When I See a Wind Turbine (March 2016).
Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, has published 37 books and almost 500 papers on “the fields of energy, environmental and population change, food production and nutrition, technical innovation, risk assessment, and public policy.”
One of the great energy experts of our age, Smil’s output easily rivals whole US Department of Energy laboratories which, incidentally, are easy candidates for elimination under a new political regime.
This month, Dr. Smil’s published a short piece in IEEE Spectrum titled “What I See When I See a Wind Turbine.”…
Continue Reading[Editor Note: MasterResource publishes a variety of energy- and classical liberal-related essays. We are not afraid of the pursuit of truth and certainly have found it. This post by Marc Rauch, vice-president and copublisher of The Auto Channel, presents a provocative thesis about how ethanol was blocked by government policy (taxation and then Prohibition) from capturing major energy markets more than a century ago. Comments are particularly welcome.]
Debates today rage over the ethanol mandate. Be that what it may, there is a market niche for ethanol as an anti-knock agent and an oxygenate to meet clean air standards. But did you know that a market for ethanol, a free-market market, existed or could have developed except for the unintended consequences of a major government intervention?
Prohibitive Taxation
Events of the American Civil War set in stone social and economic conditions that have been with us ever since, and they are certain to be with us long into the foreseeable future. …
Continue Reading“Let’s switch out for a better [climate] policy…. Then conservative activists who continue to be in the denialist camp on climate change will find themselves completely isolated.”
– Jerry Taylor, quoted in “Libertarian Group Takes on Conservatives on Carbon Tax.” Energy & Environmental News (sub. req.), March 3, 2016.
“Alarmists … clearly have decided that the best way to win the global warming debate is by shouting down the opposition and demonizing them in the eyes of the public. But that is not dispassionate scientific debate; it is more like a ‘struggle meeting’ during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”
– Jerry Taylor, The Heated Rhetoric of Global Warming, Cato Institute Commentary, September 15, 1997.
Climate ‘denier’ or ‘denialist’ is a term of political hate speech. Recently, it came from a source that for most of the last quarter century was labeled a ‘denier’ by the pugnacious Left. …
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