“Your paper inspired me to re-review some of the congressional testimony of the renewable interests to see whether the litmus test of success was a cost target or more generally, competitiveness and market penetration. I think it is clearly the latter.”

“Imagine the coach of a football team justifying a perennial losing record by telling the administration that his players are getting bigger and faster …. Surely the administration would respond—’yes, we know the general trend and our participation in it. But we want real victories, not moral victories’.”

– Letter from Robert Bradley to Dallas Burtraw, January 1999.

It was arguably the very top intellectual research paper to justify past and continuing U.S. government support for renewable energies at the time of its publication (1999). I had a chance to rebut, working at Enron (as director, public policy analysis) that was a financial supporter of Resources for the Future (RFF), as well as a business leader in renewables.…

“Veterans of earlier crises, economists prominently among them, suspected another rebirth of Malthusian fear and asked how [global warming] differed from the last several.”

– Robert Fri, “Global Warming: A Policymaker’s Dilemma” (President’s Report). Resources for the Future: 1988 Annual Report, pp. 6–7.

“The accumulation of large amounts of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere is slowly raising the global temperature and disrupting climate patterns, with implications for economic stability worldwide. Research and analysis at RFF supports informed policy design and negotiations to address climate change on national and international levels.”

– Resources for the Future website (2016).

Oh how Resources for the Future (RFF) has bought entirely into climate alarmism and forced energy transformation for fun and profit. The two quotations above, a quarter century apart, say much.

I was reminded of old-versus-new RFF by its press release last week tied to President Obama’s final state of the union speech.…

“Shameless preplanned back-slapping accompanied a Paris climate accord that guaranteed nothing except continued high fossil fuel emissions.”

– James Hansen, “Wanning Workshop + Beijing Charts + Year-End Comments,” December 29, 2015

The cheering for the global climate change agreement had not even died down before its critics were hard at work pointing out the shortcomings of the plan. One of the most prominent critics was none other than former NASA scientist and Columbia University adjunct professor, James Hansen.

Mr. Hansen is popularly credited with being the “father of global warming,” since retitled “climate change.”  In 2013, Mr. Hansen retired from NASA and government service so he could become a climate change activist and stage protests, something banned for government workers.  His subsequent activism led to several arrests outside the White House as he illegally protested against mining and the Keystone XL pipeline. …

“The renaissance has gone bad. Nuclear power is repeating the construction cost disaster of the previous round of such building in the 1970s and 1980s.”

“The advanced designs and refined techniques [at Plant Vogtle] resulted in a mess of continuing cost overruns and schedule delays.  Now Georgia Power says all the problems are to be expected in a first-of-kind project.”

Buzz Miller, executive vice president for nuclear development at Georgia Power, wrote in the Atlanta Journal Constitution back in 2010 (September 16) in regards to his company’s Plant Vogtle nuclear expansion:

“The lessons learned at home and abroad have paved the way for a new generation of U.S. nuclear power plants that feature advanced designs, refined construction techniques, early engagement by state public service commissions, and licensing process geared to a mature technology.”