Last month, a group of 15 climate scientists (included the now disgraced Peter Gleick) sent a letter to Congress expressing their displeasure over the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. President Obama has weighed in against approval, but Congress wants a green light to allow construction of the 1,700-mile, $7 billion project. Most recently, Bill Clinton weighed in for the pipeline, indicating just how deep the positives of the project are for the U.S. and world oil market.
So why are physical scientists getting political about a market-friendly pipeline to deliver oil from the Athabascan oil sands in Alberta, Canada, to various refinery locations in the Midwestern U.S. and ultimately the Gulf Coast?
The letter (reprinted at the end of this post) states that in addition to the local environmental impacts of oil sand mining (see here and here for a first-person account from Reason magazine’s Ron Bailey of the operation), burning such oil “on top of conventional fossil fuels will leave our children and grandchildren a climate system with consequences that are out of their control.”…
Continue Reading[May 7th Update: The subjects of this post have been diminished by the very unwise decision to conduct a (quickly terminated) billboard campaign linking global warming beliefs to madmen. We all make mistakes, and this was a big one. Our side has little margin for error given the huge resources of the other side. We cannot become ‘Joe Romm’ (et al.) in the quest to fight Joe Romm (et al.)]
The scandal perpetrated by climate alarmist Peter Gleick has brought the libertarian think tank Heartland Institute and its founder, president, and CEO Joseph Bast into the spotlight.
Heartland’s free-market orientation led Bast et al. into climate-change science, economics, and policy. Criticism from the climate establishment led Heartland to add a section on its website, Reply to Critics, to rebut charges that it is a ‘front group’ or anti-science.…
Continue Reading[Editor’s note: Part 1 of this case study addressed the false claim that wind has any appreciable impact on reducing coal-fired generation. This part focuses on the little known considerations relating to the effect on nuclear plants that must be cycled to balance wind, which counters claims that wind power improves general health.]
“Excessive baseload generation largely due to a contractual requirement to buy all available wind output might make it look like wind is supplying an increasing fraction of the energy supply (in TWh), while the nuclear supply appears to be decreasing. But in reality, the reduction in Bruce B unit output to permit this fallacy cannot be justified economically, nor is it a wise and conservative operation of a nuclear station.”
The following eight charts extracted from the Sygration website, which allows plotting of the Ontario IESO electrical generating unit performance, demonstrate that not only are wind turbines ineffective to replace coal, in actual fact, they do considerable harm to the stability of the electrical supply, and increase the risk of upset and accident at a nuclear generating station.…
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