“When they finish repowering Altamont with 280 more ‘bird-friendly’ machines, these killing fields will easily have five times more deadly rotor sweep than the old Altamont.”
Altamont Pass, the avian mortality capital of the U.S. wind industry since the 1980s (see “The Avian Mortality Problem” in this study), is in the news. But it is more wind-industry propaganda. The story is how safer turbines need to be installed so more birds and raptors could be saved from all those terrible smaller turbines. This hope, endorsed by the new face of Audubon, however, rests on flawed mortality studies.
For those that will not accept the fact that the wind industry manufactured these studies to suit their purposes, here is a very clear example. The Altamont Pass study published in 2004 determined that the small old turbines were killing thousands of eagles, hawks, owls and other birds each year. …
Continue ReadingJerry Taylor has written a lawyer’s brief for climate alarmism and open-ended forced energy transformation via the tax code. Might he like to demolish his new ideas in a second White Paper–“The Libertarian Case Against ‘The Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax'”? It is in his head and can be put on paper–if his emotions can get out of the way.
The intellectual case for government control of greenhouse gas emissions–the all-in cause of the anti-industrial neo-Malthusians–has always been suspect, not unlike earlier man-versus-earth outcries. But climate alarm has become weaker since its heyday (1988–98) for several reasons.
First, temperature rise has slowed significantly in the last 18 years (the warming “pause” or “hiatus“). Second, sensitivity estimates have been coming down toward long-held “skeptic” levels. Third, “fat tail” extreme-warming scenarios for risk analysis are under assault. …
Continue Reading“The difficulty in getting people to participate in the federal weatherization program, even with significant incentives and strong encouragement, as well as the negative private and social rates of return realized, suggests that extent of the market failure, if it exists at all, is substantially overblown.”
Government intervention in the name of energy efficiency provisions often enjoys bipartisan support. Relying more on engineering than real-world economic analysis, proponents argue that there is an energy efficiency gap in which individuals and firms forego such investments that would provide both private and social benefits, the latter via negative externalities associated with energy use.
Government programs, it is argued, can eliminate this market failure. But like most government programs, the benefits of government-driven energy efficiency are often far less than promised.
Market vs. Government Decision-Making
Investing in energy efficiency can be beneficial. …
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