Editor note: Del Torkelson of The American Oil & Gas Reporter covered Robert Bryce’s address talk to the Permian Basin Petroleum Association at its annual meeting in Midland last October. Torkelson’s summary is reprinted with permission.]
“One of the reasons I wrote Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future (Public Affairs: 2010) is that our discussions are fundamentally wrong-headed,” author and journalist Robert Bryce told the Permian Basin Petroleum Association.
“Politicians generally do not understand the issues of energy and power, and in particular, the issues of scale.”
Bryce expounded on a number of key themes, including density, the distinction between energy and power, and the future of natural gas and nuclear generation. He also pointed to signals that suggested ordinary citizens were losing patience with green energy sources.…
Continue ReadingNew Yorkers are digging out from another major snowfall. The 10 inches or so they got on Wednesday came less than 3 weeks after some 20 inches fell the day after Christmas.
And, odd as it may seem, some folks are linking big snows and big cold in the Big Apple to anthropogenic global warming.
But, a look back through more than 140 years of weather observations from New York’s Central Park shows little evidence to support such a contention.
On December 25, 2010, as New York City was about to be buried under almost 2 feet of snow, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Judah Cohen, a long-range forecaster for the private forecasting firm Atmospheric and Environmental Research, explaining his ideas on how big snowstorms in the Northeastern U.S.…
Continue Reading[This is Part II of an interview of Robert L. Bradley Jr. by Stephen Hicks (website here). Part I was published last week.]
Kaizen: You began as a specialist in oil and gas regulation. How did you evolve from there to where you are now?
Bradley: There are four or so stanzas in my intellectual career to date. The first was certainly oil and gas regulation, taxation, and subsidization, the subject of my Cato book, Oil, Gas & Government: The U.S. Experience. The research for that was essentially complete by 1985 when went to the corporate world by joining HNG-InterNorth, soon to become Enron.
In my first years at Enron, I became conversant with the electricity market and its regulation, which was really a new area for me, a second stanza in my development.…
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