MasterResource is home to a growing number of grassroot environmentalists who are challenging the Washington, D.C. establishment to reconsider industrial wind turbines. Jen Gilbert’s Dear Sierra Club (Canada): I Resign Over Your Anti-Environmental Wind Support and Jon Boone’s three-part The Sierra Club: How Support for Industrial Wind Technology Subverts Its History, Betrays Its Mission, and Erodes Commitment to the Scientific Method of what Robert Bradley has summarized in his post, Windpower: Environmentalists vs. Environmentalists (NIMBYism, precautionary principle vs. industrial wind). 

My piece for National Review (reprinted below) looks at the bigger picture of how reasoned criticism and intellectual diversity have struggled to penetrate the environmental mainstream. The result of such intolerance has been Faustian bargains such as the Sierra Club going all-in for wind power (see their response to Robert Bryce’s recent op-edin the New York Times).…

When New York Magazine reported earlier this month that the national editor of  the New York Times had sent an internal memo laying out a “surprisingly detailed” defense of reporter Ian Urbina’s latest front-page attack on natural gas, the hope was that the memo would spur an equally detailed response by Arthur Brisbane, the Times’ public editor.

That hope was realized when Mr. Brisbane’s 1,100-word piece was postedon the paper’s website over the weekend, a column in which Brisbane takes square aim at the Times for going “out on a limb” and “lack[ing] an in-depth dissenting view in the text” (see the Appendix below for more of his piece).

The Brisbane piece is remarkable for a number of reasons and on a number of levels, continuing the healthy scrutiny that spontaneously emerged from various respected experts over the past three weeks.…

Editor Note: Dr. Ebeling’s two-part post (Part I yesterday) provides the necessary background to understand how debt reduction is driving energy policy. Regarding the budget fight, E&E News (see Appendix) reported yesterday: “As the proverbial eleventh hour looms for the nation’s maxed-out debt limit, this week brings energy-policy battles of all sizes — from how to divide offshore-drilling revenue to the lessons gleaned from recent oil spills — that will play out amid the larger fiscal showdown.”

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“Austria was successful in pushing through policies that are popular all over the world. Austria has the most impressive records in five lines: she increased public expenditures, she increased wages, she increased social benefits, she increased bank credits [monetary expansion], she increased consumption. After all these achievements she was on the verge of ruin.”

[Editor Note: Carter’s April 1977 energy speech was also reproduced and commented upon at MasterResource.]

Thirty-two years ago today, President Carter and his energy advisor James Schlesinger got it all wrong in an emergency television address to the nation. Their neo-Malthusian, government-as-engineer moment should never be forgotten but stand as timeless warning about the anti-market, anti-energy mentality.

In the summer of 1979, many Americans were stuck in the gasoline lines. There was a lot of lost time and nervousness. There was fighting and worse. The market as a buffer of civility was gone. Americans were not used to such a predicament and had the common sense to know that something was very abnormal and not to be tolerated. They were mad.

Here is the background of his energy speech, considered as the most important speech of his presidency:

On June 30, 1979, a weary Jimmy Carter was looking forward to a few days’ vacation in Hawaii, as Air Force One sped him away from a grueling economic summit in Tokyo.