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.…
Continue Reading[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.…
Continue ReadingThousands of bureaucrats are at another cushy climate confab–this time in Cancun–while Senators Bingaman, Brownback and Reid are contemplating how to ram a federal renewable energy quota through a lame-duck session. Their prospects are not good, which should give them more time to consider the experiences of Europe and windpower. The results of this experiment in energy coercion are humbling.
Germany, specifically, is in the throes of a windpower boondoggle that should be heard the world over. The general lesson is that energy forcing brings with it technological risk that must be factored into the public policy equation.
A North Sea Boondoggle
Barely two months after the inauguration ceremony for Germany’s first pilot offshore wind farm, “Alpha Ventus” in the North Sea, all six of the newly installed wind turbines were completely idle, due to gearbox damage.…
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