‘Climate Alarmism and Corporate Responsibility’ (2000 essay for today’s debate)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 5, 2018 1 Comment

Corporate policy makers entering the fray should be guided by two principles, both reflecting the balance of evidence at the intersection of climate science and climate economics. First, mandatory GHG programs should be rejected in favor of voluntary approaches….  Second, voluntary actions by corporations should not go beyond win-win “no regrets” initiatives. Control practices that are uneconomic penalize either consumers or stockholders and politicize the issue of corporate responsibility.”

– Robert Bradley, “Climate Alarmism and Corporate Responsibility.” Electricity Journal, August/September 2000.

Upon the election of Donald Trump, the environmental Left redoubled its effort to politicize business on the climate issue. The subtitle to an early 2017 article in Yale Climate Connections, for example, “Business Leadership on Climate Seen as Key,” read: “With expectations of a much lower federal leadership role on controlling carbon emissions, key sectors of business community seen by some as maintaining momentum.”…

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Twenty-Five Industrial Wind Energy Deceptions

By -- September 4, 2018 19 Comments

TRYING to pin down the arguments of wind promoters is a bit like trying to grab a greased balloon. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, it morphs into a different story and escapes your grasp. Let’s take a quick highlight review of how things have evolved with merchandising industrial wind energy.

1 – Wind energy was abandoned for most commercial and industrial applications, well over a hundred years ago. Even in the late 1800s it was totally inconsistent with our burgeoning, more modern needs for power. When we throw the switch, we expect that the lights will go on – 100% of the time. It’s not possible for wind energy, by itself, to EVER do this, which is one of the main reasons it was relegated to the archival collection of antiquated technologies (along with such other inadequate energy sources as horse and oxen power).

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Remembering the Death of Federal Cap-and-Trade (2010 NYT analysis revisited)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 13, 2018 1 Comment

“This is potentially a $3 trillion tax,” [C. Boyden] Gray said, “which is pretty steep in the best of times, and poison in the worst of times.”

“… in trying to assemble a majority to pass it, Mr. Waxman and Mr. Markey dished out a cornucopia of concessions and exemptions to coal companies, utilities, refiners, heavy industry and agribusinesses. The original simplicity was lost, replaced by a bazaar in which those with the most muscle got the best deals.”

– John Broder, ‘Cap and Trade’ Loses Its Standing as Energy Policy of Choice, New York Times, March 25, 2010.

The carbon tax is less a cat with nine lives than a dead cat with nine causes. Higher immediate energy prices for one. Border tariffs, equity adjustments, federal control, global government makes five.…

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“The Ideology of Fossil Fuels” (Deep Ecology/Malthusian/ Postmodern/Totalitarian Thought Today)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 11, 2018 2 Comments

“Imagining a low-carbon world, then, means reevaluating our conception of freedom itself.”

– Audrea Lim, “The Ideology of Fossil Fuels.” Dissent, Spring 2018.

Audrea Lim in a recent issue of Dissent (a quarterly magazine for Left Progressivism) penned an essay, “The Ideology of Fossil Fuels.” The journalist/editor at Verso Books offers a rather bizarre view of the energy world. She writes in part:

Why is it so much easier, as the saying goes, to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? …. The most straightforward answer to the question, perhaps, lies in the sticky substance that fuels capitalism as we know it, and is daily bringing us closer to the apocalypse of the [doomsday] preppers’ imagination: oil.

“The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use,” writes the postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty in a seminal essay collected in Energy Humanities.

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‘Sense of Congress’ Resolution on a Carbon Tax (parsing the argument)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 10, 2018 No Comments Continue Reading

Twenty-One Bad Things About Wind Energy — and Three Reasons Why

By -- March 22, 2018 49 Comments Continue Reading

Warring Against Natural Gas: Joint EEI/NRDC Statement to NARUC (crony environmentalism at work)

By -- February 26, 2018 4 Comments Continue Reading

The “Powering America” Hearings (Part I)

By -- November 14, 2017 1 Comment Continue Reading

Exxon Mobil and the Carbon Tax: ‘Upon Further Review’

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- January 10, 2017 2 Comments Continue Reading

Offshore Wind: A Problematic Future (AWEA’s hype falls short)

By -- May 17, 2016 1 Comment Continue Reading