For well-being, present and future, including overall governance, health and medical care, financial, economic, human rights, equality, peace, security and liberty, etc.,[1] we have to stop playing political games with energy policy in the developed countries in the West and turn to sound approaches.
In particular, Europe must withdraw from its desperate and destructive attempts at regaining some measure of world ‘leadership’, which it deservedly lost in the 20th century as a result of succumbing to dangerous extremist policies in many areas, including political, social, judicial, economic, military and international matters.
Europe’s “leadership” conceit includes questionable, radical energy policies, particularly in electricity systems, to “de-carbonize” the world with “new” (really ancient) renewables. This futility is wasting resources on a grand scale as is now beginning to be realized (here and here).…
Continue ReadingIt is the second most famous term in the history of economics after Adam Smith’s metaphor invisible hand. It describes the competitive market process in the real world. It was coined in 1942 by the famous, iconoclastic Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter, who would reminisce:
I set out to become the greatest lover in Vienna, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the greatest economist in the world. Alas, for the illusions of youth…. As a horseman, I was never really first rate.
“Creative Destruction” …
The best businesses rise to the top in consumer-driven markets. Less competitive firms contract and even disappear. Creative destruction is the process whereby the bad is eliminated, the better replaces the good, and past performance gives way to new strategies and victors. No firm is forever, and financial loss is a characteristic of capitalism, as is the more used term profit.…
Continue Reading“Tension in the room mounted. The old man … pleaded with the [California] planning commission to protect his pigeons from ‘the Cuisinarts of the air’. The arrow went straight home, sending up a roar from the audience. A new image had been created, and the cameras flashed it across the country. Although often credited to staging by Cerrell and Associates, the term was conceived by the Sierra Club.”
… Continue Reading– Paul Gipe, Wind Energy Comes of Age (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995, p. 450.
“I once believed in the Sierra Club, until the CLUB ( an insular bunch of activists who aren’t looking at the entire picture but only at their own agendas) started fully supporting [windpower] …. Everything the environmentalists (including myself for 20 years) have worked so hard to protect, is now being destroyed or in jeopardy.