A Free-Market Energy Blog

Heritage Foundation List of Failing or At-Risk Taxpayer Energy Ventures (34 companies, $7.5 billion, and counting)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 23, 2012

The Heritage Foundation (founded 1980) is a think-tank leader in the current debate over energy policy and related environmental issues. Heritage’s energy worldview is stated at their website:

Energy and environmental policy is a national priority. Lawmakers should implement a long-term plan that allows free markets to balance supply and demand, ensures reliable and competitively priced energy for the future, and creates incentives for responsible stewardship of the nation’s resources and environment.

A recent report, “President Obama’s Taxpayer-Based Green Energy Failures,” lists 34 examples of “faltering or bankrupt green-energy companies” (with * denoting companies that have filed for bankruptcy). The at-risk total is approximately $7.5 billion, of which $1.6  billion is in receivership.

The numbers will only get higher. Yesterday, it was reported that the Solyndra loss could be $849 million (not $535 million).

Continue Reading

Anti-Oil Sands: Perverse Ethics in the Name of the Environment

By -- October 22, 2012

[Ed. note: An important front in the energy-policy debate concerns the moral case for rich, dense, plentiful, reliable energy that is handmaiden to industrial society. In addition to the post below, see the contributions of Alex Epstein at this site.]

The duplicity and hypocrisy of environmental pressure groups seem to be matched only by their consummate skill at manipulating public opinion, amassing political power, securing taxpayer-funded government grants, and persuading people to send them money and invest in “ethical” stock funds.

In the annals of “green” campaigns, those against biotechnology, DDT and Alar are especially prominent. To those we should now add the well-orchestrated campaigns against Canadian oil sands and the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Background

Oil has been seeping out of Northern Alberta soils and river banks for millennia.

Continue Reading

Presidential Advice: Sea-Level Rise a Yawner

By Chip Knappenberger -- October 19, 2012

“My best advice to both candidates is to just leave the issue alone. Sea-level rise does not represent a national threat, and trying to do something about it through our energy policy would cause hardship without a discernible impact along our coasts.”

With the final presidential debate set for October 22 in Boca Raton, a group of Florida “city and county officials and scientists,” with help from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), have sent each candidate an open letter asking them to “address this issue” of sea level rise while they are in campaigning and debating in Florida.

This publicity play for climate crusaders will probably not work because …. facts are facts. There just isn’t much there to get away from real, here-and-now issues that have otherwise dominated most of the debates.…

Continue Reading

Thomas Edison and the Electric Vehicle (chapter 1 of EV's Chapter 11)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 18, 2012
Continue Reading

Winning vs. Losing Energy Policy

By -- October 17, 2012
Continue Reading

Energy Density is Key (Richard Fulmer gets back to the basics)

By Richard W. Fulmer -- October 16, 2012
Continue Reading

Climate-Change Exaggeration: Then and Now

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 15, 2012
Continue Reading

3Q: 2012 Update: MasterResource

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 12, 2012
Continue Reading

Proud NIMBYISM Against Windpower

By Nick Stanger -- October 11, 2012
Continue Reading

Why I'm Not a Member of the Solar Energy Industries Association

By David Bergeron -- October 10, 2012
Continue Reading