The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy and environmental policies. Our premise is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science (please consult WiseEnergy.org. for more information).

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every three weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and the environment. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

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Some very good articles in this issue are:

What’s the cost of CO2 emissions abatement with wind turbines?

The Poor Need Affordable Energy

Study: Globally Coal Growing Faster than any other Energy Source

The Difficulties Of Powering The Modern World With Renewables

Lessons from Europe: Recipe for a high-cost energy system

Is the European Renewable Energy Bubble About To Burst?…

In 1979, Robert L. Bradley Jr. contracted with the Cato Institute to write a history of U.S. oil and gas regulation. Cato did not have an energy position yet in Washington, D.C. (that came a decade later) but was very interested in the subject. Indeed, with debilitating natural gas shortages in the winters of 1971/72 and 1976/77, and oil shortages during 1974 and 1979, the policy landscape was ripe for free-market energy analysis.

What began as an 18-month project turned into a four-year, six-months relentless research-and-writing effort. Finding a publisher for what would be a two volume, 2,000-page treatise proved difficult. Bradley revised the manuscript during the decade delay, although leaving the cut-off year at 1984. Rowman & Littlefield published the work in 1996 as Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S.…

“Far exceeding the legal authority that Congress has delegated to the EPA, this power plan would set the U.S. on an even more aggressive path to reduce CO2 than has been taken by some European countries where electric prices are two to three times higher than the average U.S. rate.”

– Kathleen Hartnett White, Texas Public Policy Foundation (May 7, 2015)

Congratulations to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) for congratulating Texas political leaders for standing firm–and mighty tall–against climate alarmism mandated from Washington, DC. Obama might be high in the saddle right now, and the spin-science-Left might be tossing climate anger at realistic science, but the voting public isn’t buying it. Abbott, Cornyn, and Cruz are playing a winning intellectual and political hand alongside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.…

“Many of the writers about ‘peak oil’ have moved on to ‘peak everything’ (Richard Heinberg) and ‘peak food’ (Paul Roberts). They apply the same flawed model that treats resources as static and ignores investment and innovation. This is especially telling since the model has failed so abysmally in the case of food and famine, as the record of Paul Ehrlich and his followers has shown.”

In his excellent book, Future Babble, Dan Gardner demonstrates empirically that the neo-Malthusians who have plagued us for the past half century have not only been egregiously wrong in their predictions; they have tended to insist that they were, in fact, correct, all contrary evidence notwithstanding. They accomplish this primarily by selective memory, such as greatly understating their original claims, or treating minor, regular difficulties (such as local famines) as confirmation of their apocalyptic visions.…