Setting aside the matter that wind turbines are not an effective means to supply utility-scale electricity, the claims of job creation and 21st century industrial development are equally illusory. A New York Times (NYT) article last month spoke volumes on this.
I have frequently claimed that the recently created wind turbine manufacturing industries in Europe (Denmark, Germany and Spain) are in jeopardy from competition by the emerging giants, China, India and the U.S. The Times article reports that China now controls almost half of the global market, having absorbed billions of dollars in government assistance and consumer subidies.
The wind businesses in these European countries have existed for little more than a decade, and having saturated their domestic markets, have enjoyed a brief, and unsustainable, dominance of global markets. I may have been mistaken in including the U.S.…
Continue ReadingSenator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has found another disguise for lining the pockets of “alternative energy” producers with consumers’ dollars directed there not by rational economic choices but by government mandate.
Once a supporter of cap and trade, Graham now supports a “Clean Energy Standard” that would require utilities to generate increasingly high percentages of electricity from “renewable” sources like wind, solar, and biofuels, from nuclear, and from coal using “carbon capture and sequestration”—catching the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted when coal burns and forcing it, under pressure, into deep geological formations for long-term storage to keep it out of the atmosphere.
A variation on that theme suggested by Entergy Corp. head Wayne Leonard in the Wall Street Journal suggests that we begin with the seemingly innocuous step of increasing U.S.…
Continue Reading[Note: Last summer, philosophy professor Stephen Hicks (website here) interviewed MasterResource founder Rob Bradley. “The Robert L. Bradley Jr. Interview, ‘Enron and Political Entrepreneurship'” covers Bradley’s intellectual career and worldview regarding the market order and energy.
This series (in four parts: Part II, Part III, Part IV) is the full interview (with some elaboration), from which an abbreviated version was published in KAIZEN magazine (Issue 13: August 2010) and a longer version was posted online.]
Introduction
Rob Bradley worked at Enron for 16 years. As director of public policy analysis for his last seven years there, he wrote speeches for the late Ken Lay, Enron’s CEO, who was convicted in 2005 of fraud and conspiracy.
Bradley is also founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research of Houston, Texas, and Washington, D.C.…
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