Energy and Poverty – What is Really at Stake in Cancun

By Donald Hertzmark -- December 6, 2010

A year ago during the Copenhagen conference on climate change, I published a post, Electricity for the Poor–What Copenhagen Really Needs to Confront, where I noted that some 1.5 billion people did not have access to reliable electricity supplies. To update this, there is more electricity generated this year than last, mostly due to newly commissioned large conventional sources of electric power – gas, coal, hydro, nuclear. The new estimate is 1.4 billion living in energy squalor.

To hear the good and the great at Cancun, the sustainability issue of energy poverty is hidden. Occasionally, one of the climate-change grandees slips up and admits that this the real subject is wealth redistribution, not climate. But that is about as close as it gets.

All the more reason that the international forums on climate change, energy environment, and the like should get to first principles and study this map: The World At Night (courtesy of Bert Christensen)

When you fly overnight from Johannesburg to Europe the lights thin out just north of Lusaka, Zambia, a few more in Zambia’s Copper Belt and then nothing (and I mean nothing) until the North African coastline. …

Daylight Saving Time: Arrogant Central Planning

By Robert Murphy -- December 3, 2010

Although smart phones and computers make it easier to remember, last month Americans endured the semi-annual hassle of changing their clocks an hour. “Daylight Saving Time” (DST) was originally started during World War I to allegedly save energy. Jimmy Carter gave it to us in peacetime as part of his National Energy Plan. In practice, DST causes needless headaches—and even heart attacks!—and arguably doesn’t even save energy.

Chalk it up to yet another failed government intervention.

The Hubris of DST

Joe Romm is not afraid to recommend society-changing government intervention in order to achieve a conservation goal, and he proposes drastic carbon legislation to prevent what he sees as “hell and high water.” Yet even this central planner hit the nail on the head when he complained: “You can’t save daylight by moving around the hands on your clock, of course.…

Who is Charles Koch? (A builder of business and critic of political capitalism)

By Roger Donway -- December 2, 2010

[Editor note: Robert L. Bradley Jr.’s book review of Charles Koch’s The Science of Success (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2007) appeared in the August/September 2008 issue of The New Individualist (Atlas Society). It is reprinted below to better publicize the worldview of the individual who has been behind a number of free-society initiatives across the country for several decades–and is now a target of Al Gore and the anti-free-market Left).

In 1859, the first treatise on “best practices” appeared: Self-Help, With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance, by Samuel Smiles. Motivational self-improvement books were not new, but Smiles’s 400-page opus was persuasive. Profusely illustrated with stories of men-made-good in industry, engineering, the arts, and music, Self-Help combined age-tested wisdom with knowledge of the industrial present.

From Self-Help to Organizational Success

Nearly 150 years later, the most recent addition to the self-help literature is The Science of Success by Charles G.…