Search Results for: "wind"
Relevance | DateNational Wind Watch: Organizing the Grassroots Against Industrial Wind (Will D.C. environmentalists get back to their roots?)
By Thomas Stacy II -- April 1, 2011 4 CommentsThere is lots going on outside of Washington, D.C. when it comes to the environment, and perhaps no issue is bigger than the grassroot revolt against industrial wind parks. Such is not a ploy or plot by Big Oil or Big Coal or big anything. It is a natural reaction by those under a lifestyle assault by a mega-instrusive energy source that is about government dependence, political capitalism, and false environmental dogma–not the common good and environmental progress.
Future historians will no doubt wonder how Big Environmentalism got so far off track to support industrial windpower. A machine in every pristine–is this what environmental elitism at its worst?
“Let’s take back our environment from Big Environmentalism” could be the rallying cry of this new environmental movement. Are such groups as the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and (you fill in the blank) listening?…
Continue ReadingEnergy Debate in Wonderland: Let's Go for the Kill Against Windgas (Part II: Effective Capacity)
By Jon Boone -- March 29, 2011 6 Comments“… paying anything for resources that yield no or little effective capacity seems deranged as a means of promoting economic recovery for the most dedicatedly modern country on the planet.”
In energy debates (such as held recently by the Economist), arguments can be made against government-dependent renewables on grounds that coal and natural gas are in abundant supply and fossil fuels are being burned cleaner and cleaner.
These arguments, however, are mere body blows. Robert Bryce (see Part I) should have supplied the knockout punch by reminding all that any meaningful discussion of electricity production, which could soon embrace 50% of our overall energy use, must consider the entwined goals of reliability, security, and affordability, since reliable, secure, affordable electricity is the lynchpin of our modernity.…
Continue ReadingEnergy Debates in Wonderland: Let's Go for the Kill Against GasWind (Part I)
By Jon Boone -- March 28, 2011 5 CommentsMarch Hare (to Alice): Have some wine.
(Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea.)
Alice: I don’t see any wine.
March Hare: There isn’t any.
Alice: Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it.
March Hare: It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited.
— From Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
Energy journalist Robert Bryce in Power Hungry foretells an electricity future anchored by natural gas that will bridge the transition to nuclear power. With his third book in less than a decade, Bryce is now a leading light of the energy policy debate, appearing regularly on op-ed pages and on news shows.
Bryce recently participated in two debates. In one hosted by The Economist, he argued for the proposition that “natural gas will do more than renewables to limit the world’s carbon emissions.”…
Continue Reading'Green Jobs': An Application of the Broken Window Fallacy (Henry Hazlitt speaks to us today)
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- March 18, 2011 6 CommentsThe broken window…. An elementary fallacy. Anybody, one would think, would be able to avoid it after a few moments’ thought. Yet the broken window fallacy, under a hundred disguises, is the most persistent in the history of economics. It is more rampant now than at any time in the past. It is solemnly reaffirmed every day by great captains of industry, by chambers of commerce, by labor union leaders, by editorial writers and newspaper columnists and radio commentators, by learned statisticians using the most refined techniques, by professors of economics in our best universities. In their various ways they all dilate upon the advantages of destruction.
– Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, chapter 4.
Henry Hazlitt (1894–1993) was a journalist turned economist and philosopher and overall giant of free-market thought.…
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