“… solar’s production boom has left its recycling infrastructure in the dust…. The totality of these unforeseen costs could crush industry competitiveness.”

“A first step to forestalling disaster may be for solar panel producers to start lobbying for similar legislation in the United States immediately, instead of waiting for solar panels to start clogging landfills.”

“The same problem is looming for other renewable-energy technologies.”

In The Dark Side of Solar Power, (Harvard Business Review: June 2021), authors Atalay Atasu, Serasu Duran, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove bring the solar boom back down to earth. Quotations follow from the article (subtitles added):

• Solar’s pandemic-proof performance is due in large part to the Solar Investment Tax Credit, which defrays 26% of solar-related expenses for all residential and commercial customers (just down from 30% during 2006-2019).

“Damage and destroy new CO2 emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up…. Sabotage, after all, is not incompatible with social distancing.” (Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, 2021: 3, 67)

“How will Malm keep people from freezing to death in the winter or dying from heat exhaustion in summer after his followers have disabled power plants or the pipelines that supply them?” (below)

There are “no regrets” policy changes that can reduce CO2 emissions by expanding, not reducing, freedom. Repealing the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (aka, the Jones Act), for example, would eliminate the Act’s enormous carbon footprint. The Act, which requires goods shipped between American ports to be transported on American owned, built, and crewed ships, makes it impossible for Americans to make full use of the veritable conveyor belt of ships that navigate our nations’ waters. …

“Using moralistic yet blatantly dishonest slogans and pseudo-science, the environmental movement has digressed dangerously…. One of the most fundamental truths rarely surfaces among the movement: there is no credible alternative to hydrocarbons in both the near and far foreseeable futures.” (Michael Economides, below)

He was irascible in person but a rare energy realist in thought and action. Michael Economides (1949–2013) was many things, including leading oil consultant and Lecturer in Petroleum Engineering at the Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston. [1]

With Ronald Oligney, he authored an important book, The Color of Oil: The History, the Money and the Politics of the World’s Biggest Business (2000). Some quotations follow:

“… energy is the world’s biggest business, and it continues to move unstoppably forward.” (p. 17)

“We predict that the world will not run out of oil for the next three centuries, at least.”

Ed. note: The third part in this series covers IER as a full-time organization, which occurred in 2002, some 13 years after its founding (in 1989). Part I covered the history of the Institute for Humane Studies–Texas, the forerunner to IER. Part II reviewed the formation and early history of IER in Houston, Texas.

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Q1. Roger Donway: The last interview explained your dual life as a full-time employee of Enron Corp. and the president of the “think bucket” IER. How did IER emerge full time?

A1. Robert Bradley Jr.: My Enron life ended a day after the company declared bankruptcy on Sunday December 1, 2001. I was part of the mass layoff the next day. Some 4,000 of us were let go where we were told to clear out our desks and leave.