Two weeks ago, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) hosted a state-of-the-art climate and energy conference in the nation’s energy capital of Houston. The global warming establishment may have stayed away, but a large crowd was treated to a sound, multi-disciplinary review of the physical science, political economy, and resource economics.
The evening keynote for At The Crossroads: Energy & Climate Policy Summit was an address by Texas Governor Rick Perry. While Perry’s general public policy positions are free-market–and thus pro-consumer and pro-taxpayer–his energy security, don’t-import-but-export argument smacks of Mercantilism and U.S.-side protectionism. Furthermore, Perry pulled his punches regarding the conference’s major themes on climate and energy policy. It was a timid, uninspired keynote just when the momentum dictated going the other way.
Soft on Climate Propoganda
Perry could have, should have, reiterated the conference’s major themes: the 15–20 year ‘pause’ in global warming; lowered climate sensitivity estimates (and explanation for the same in the peer-reviewed literature); the desperate, speculative tie-in’s between anthropogenic climate change and extreme weather events (if there has been no warming, how can ‘climate change’ be involved?);…
Continue Reading“This proposal delivers its ‘green’ energy at roughly twice the cost of a LA-basin gas-generated power, estimates energy expert Tom Tanton, since transmission losses from Wyoming to LA would be between 10 and 11 percent. This is surely a project that should be taken with a grain, or a chunk, of salt.”
California, trying to desalinize their drinking and irrigation water, is floating the idea of buying and storing renewable energy in a salt mine near Salt Lake City as part of a plan to get ‘green’ electrons to Los Angeles. This technology-over-economics, cost-be-damned project would use an existing Utah-to-California transmission line previously dedicated to coal-by-wire from the Intermountain Coal Power Plant.
This scheme, a joint venture by Pathfinder Energy, Magnum Energy, Dresser-Rand and Duke-American Transmission, is based on the purported success of a preexisting energy storage project in Alabama that uses compressed air stored in natural caverns to power electricity producing generators.…
Continue Reading“Big Green had a big impact on the U.S. Administration in the 1990s, deserving much ‘credit’ for the Kyoto cap-and-trade-with-offsets, which led to sharply accelerated global carbon emissions.“
“Most marchers tomorrow [September 21, 2014] will be liberals. The truth they must face is the fact that prescriptive liberal policies have no chance of solving the global climate problem.”
In Speaking Truth to Power—and to Friends (September 20, 2014), James Hansen continues to denigrate the efforts of the Big Green/Obama establishment to address climate change. For reasons that Hansen repeatedly stresses in his posts (regularly summarized at MasterResource), climate alarmists may wish they had more Green Party candidates to vote for next month.
Hansen and many other eco-alarmists might Go-Green-Party at the 2016 ballot box to support the climate section of the Green Party’s ecology platform:
… Continue Reading[W]e especially support the reduction of consumption of the world’s raw materials by the industrialized Northern Hemisphere.