“Home to half the world’s population, Asia accounts for three-fourths of global coal consumption today. More important, it accounts for more than three-fourths of coal plants that are either under construction or in the planning stages — a whopping 1,200 of them….”

 – Somini Sengupta, The World Needs to Quit Coal. Why Is It So Hard? New York Times, November 24, 2018.

It’s a fossil-fuel world. Dense, storable, portable mineral energies are winning despite much government-directed misdirection at home and abroad. And the Paris global climate accord, three years old next month, is reeling as a result.

Every now and then, the anti-fossil-fuel media owns up to the harsh reality of consumers choosing the most economical, convenient energies. This was the case of a recent New York Times feature, The World Needs to Quit Coal.…

” … there are still numerous economic and societal barriers to rapid decarbonization.”

“And it is not like wind and solar come free of environmental concerns. The sheer size of wind and solar installations needed to underpin our electricity system is significant.”

“… lower income households will bear the largest relative burdens of the higher energy costs that are likely as a result of climate policies. While there are ways of mitigating these unequal impacts, they require difficult trade-offs.”

– Daniel Raimi and Alan Krupnick, “Decarbonization: It Ain’t That Easy, RFF Blog Post, April 20, 2018.

A recent blog post by Daniel Raimi and Alan Krupnick of Resources for the Future (RFF) is unusual, even remarkable, given the institutional history of their organization. For RFF in recent decades has gone Left, way Left, for the cause of climate alarmism/forced energy transformation (see here). …

“When an abundant natural fall of water is at hand, nothing can be cheaper or better than water power. But everything depends upon local circumstances. The occasional mountain torrent is simply destructive. Many streams and rivers only contain sufficient water half the year round and costly reservoirs alone could keep up the summer supply.”

-W. S. Jevons (1865)

Serious students of energy policy should read the blogs at the Institute for Energy Research (IER), not only those at this site. The current blog at IER, “Renewables Generated 103 Percent of Portugal’s Electricity Consumption in March [2018],” explains that country’s unique situation of being hydro-dependent and wind-tied. And so it is that abnormally high rainfall has blessed Portugal this year–quite the opposite from a year ago.

Enter the wisdom of the ages, which in this case gets to W.…

“I think [Julian Simon] probably should have been considered for a Nobel Prize.  He took a very independent position with little backing, dug deep and provided very good evidence for his predictions and expectations.”

“I do not believe there is a natural resource economics.  I believe there is good economics and bad economics.”

• Milton Friedman (below)

Editor note: Milton Friedman would be 105 this day. Born July 31, 1912, in New York City, he died on November 16, 2006, in San Francisco, age 94.

Reprinted below is an exchange between Robert Bradley Jr. and the Milton Friedman when the Nobel Laureate was 91 years old–a testament to the patience, scholarship, and longevity of one of the greatest social thinkers of modern time.