The Sierra Club’s war on coal, since joined by its war on gas, is really a conflict against industrial progress. Reliable, affordable energy is a ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, and the enemy has wanted to take it ever since Paul Ehrlich et al. got going in the 1960s and 1970s.
The irony is that an honest Sierra Club executive back in the 1980s gave windpower its most infamous nickname, the Cuisinarts of the Air. Sierra Club members have resigned over the organization’s pro-wind policy, and grassroot environmentalists have tasted wind only to spit it out (here and here). And the Old Mare refuses to address devastating criticism about industrial wind, such as from Jon Boone here at MasterResource. [1]
Many examples of Sierra Club policy against environmentally superior dense energy can be chronicled.…
Continue Reading“I can’t downplay this. It’s obviously very exciting for us…. This is opening up a new chapter in Alaska’s oil and gas history that is literally starting today.”
– Pete Slaiby, Shell Alaska. Quoted in Jennifer A. Dlouhy, “Shell Begins Drilling Well off Alaska,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 9, 2012.
Profit-seeking, consumer-directed business is proper, necessary, and heroic. Free-market-based energy enterprises (oil, gas, and coal) are quite unlike government-dependent (crony) businesses (ethanol, windpower, and on-grid solar). Ken Lay’s Enron is (was) a leading example of the latter; Koch Industries’ Charles Koch, writing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, epitomizes the former.
Shell has scaled back its (scarcely profitable) renewable energy investments and is back to its oil and gas roots. Its advertising is no longer about pie-in-the-sky energies and more about here, now energy.…
Continue ReadingSeven score and nine years ago, President Lincoln spoke about government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Yet, today, our lives are determined not so much by We the People, as by a distant central government, particularly increasingly powerful, unelected and unaccountable executive-branch agencies.
Consider the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), arguably the most intrusive administrative agency of all. Under Administrator Lisa Jackson, we have, at best, government of, by, and for some people. Or in the words of one public-choice economist, a government “of the Busy (political activists), by the Bossy (government managers), for the Bully (lobbying activists).” [1]
Secretary Jackson seeks not merely to regulate, but to legislate; not merely to protect our health and environment against every conceivable risk, but to control every facet of our economy, livelihoods and lives.…
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