“Many European countries are waking up to the disaster of extravagant subsidies to renewable energy. But Britain isn’t. The lesson for Americans is simply that throwing money at renewable energy is a huge economic mistake, but politicians can keep the racket going regardless. It will take robust opposition to stop the United States repeating Europe’s mistakes.”
Renewable energy has proved an expensive and unreliable source of energy everywhere it has been tried on a significant scale. And now there is a big divide among the major European economies that have enthusiastically adopted wind, solar and the other renewables.
While the UK ploughs ahead by throwing good money after bad, Italy, Spain and Germany are cutting back on their taxpayer/ratepayer-funded generosity toward politically correct energies. France, meanwhile, with its abundant nuclear power, has smartly stayed out of the game.…
Continue ReadingLast week, an advance copy of a paper to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) was released which reported that a collection of “experts” suggests that climate tipping points (codename for something bad but we don’t know exactly what) would be knocked over by 2200 if we stay on our current greenhouse gas emissions pathway (for about the next 200 years). Underlying these views is the experts’ opinions as to what the earth’s equilibrium climate sensitivity—the rise in global temperatures resulting from a doubling of the earth carbon dioxide concentration—likely is.
But do the experts opinions actually reflect the scientific knowledge on these subjects?
The answer is no.
In fact, the experts’ opinions tended towards the extreme, despite recent science which should have reeled them in.…
Continue ReadingMasterResource, a free-market energy blog, continues to attract new talent and a growing audience. We have had approximately 45 authors to date, and our cumulative views have exceeded one-half million.
We are not a mega-blog, but we are an important addition to the energy literature that will, like a good book, be accessed and referenced for years to come.
At Technorati, MasterResource has consistently been in the top 25 (out of 1,550) “green” blogs and has reached as high as #7. But more importantly, serious students of energy policy are regulars at our site, reading our once-a-day, in-depth post or tracking down material on what Enron/Ken Lay really did, what Jim Hansen or John Holdren really said, or what BP was doing under John Browne. We preserve the excesses of the smartest-guys-in-the-energy-room for posterity.…
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