Search Results for: "Rand, Ayn"
Relevance | DateRebutting NRDC on California’s Drought
By Wayne Lusvardi -- April 27, 2015 No Comments“Climate change is likely to increase the frequency of warmer winters and low snowpack.”
– Ben Chou (Natural Resources Defense Council), “California Needs Proactive Ways to Deal with Drought,” EnergyNewsData.com, April 3, 2015.
“Nature makes drought; man makes water shortages. Government water conservation policies, misinformed by the environmentalist ideology of the NRDC, are worsening the water shortage.” (below)
Ben Chou’s March 31, 2015 column on the Natural Resources Defense Council’s “Switchboard” website, cross posted on April 3rd at EnergyNewsData.com, requires rebuttal if we are going to deal with the California drought empirically and not ideologically.
Chou correctly writes that California’s April 2015 snowpack is indicative of the amount of water that can be carried forward into the hot summer months. Even so, water supplies are measured in California over a 5- and 10-year meteorological cycle.…
Continue ReadingCan Green Energy be Demythologized? (Part 2)
By Wayne Lusvardi and Charles Warren -- June 6, 2014 5 Comments“Capitalism has a built-in incapacity to generate legitimations of itself, and it is particularly deprived of mythic potency; consequently, it depends upon the legitimating effects of its sheer facticity or upon association with other, non-economic legitimating symbols.”
– Peter Berger, The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions about Prosperity, Equality and Liberty
In Part 1 of this two-part series, conventional, market-based electricity was described as inescapably lacking an overarching myth that gives it legitimacy against postmodern renewable energy, global-warming ideology, and energy regulation in California. This insight comes from sociologist Peter L. Berger’s 1986 book The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions about Prosperity, Equality and Liberty.
Given Capitalism’s mythic deprivation, what then can be done, if anything, to re-legitimate cheap, clean or cleaner conventional energy and demythologize renewable energy?
Can Anything Be Done?…
Continue ReadingEnergy Postmodernism: Obama Today, Amory Lovins Yesterday (645-page powerplant rule to nirvana)
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- June 4, 2014 2 CommentsAll good things to all people. That is how the Obama/EPA Power Plant Rule is being sold this week in the U.S. and around the world.
Lower prices, more jobs, greater security, accelerated innovation. New for old, cleaner for dirtier. Better air and less ailment. Take the disadvantages of rationing carbon dioxide in U.S. power plants and assert just the opposite. Get others to echo for a ‘shared narrative.’ Think energy postmodernism of wish, want competitive intermittent renewable energy.
Say it is a free lunch. Better yet, say it is a lunch that we are paid to eat.
And all this for a better future. “This is something that is important for all of us,” Obama stated in regard to the proposal. “As parents, as grandparents, as citizens, as folks who care about the health of our families and also want to make sure that future generations are able to enjoy this beautiful blue ball in the middle of space that we’re a part of.”…
Continue ReadingEnergy Realism Amid Climate Alarmism: James Hansen Rides Again
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 25, 2014 5 Comments“Indeed, a case could be made that politicians have been pushed into a situation such that they have no choice but to approve continued coal-burning, hydro-fracking for increased gas and oil production, and pursuit of oil and gas in extreme and pristine environments.” (James Hansen)
“I am saying that the global energy discussion should be based on facts, not on myths.” (James Hansen)
Yesterday’s post on James Hansen’s new analysis, “Renewable Energy, Nuclear Power and Galileo: Do Scientists Have a Duty to Expose Popular Misconceptions?, discussed how the anti-nuclear, pro-wind strategy of mainstream environmentalism works to increase, not decrease, greenhouse-gas emissions. Such an incredible irony can only be blamed on philosophical fraud, of believing in imaging and emotions rather than reality. [1]
Hansen’s article also speaks energy/political truth to Big Environmentalism in other ways that help steer the energy debate towards realism and away from postmodernism.…
Continue Reading