[Editor’s Note: This is Part I of a two-part analysis examining projections of increasing human mortality to accompany projections of increases in temperature resulting from greenhouse gas emissions produced from burning fossil fuels to produce energy. Such studies typically give short shrift to the effectiveness of rather simple adaptations and the power of cheap, and reliable electricity.]

Increased use of air-conditioning, made possible by access to affordable, reliable electricity, goes a long way towards counteracting the acute effects of excessive heat events, a.k.a. heat waves, on human mortality and morbidity. Projections of rapidly rising human heat-related mortality under a warming climate, such as those made in a recent paper published by Joan Ballester and colleagues, fail to acknowledge the power and reality that this and other (even simpler) adaptations can have at protecting human life.…

“The social usefulness of well-defined property rights, free exchange, and the system of relative money prices . . . has perhaps been demonstrated most convincingly by the catastrophic failure in the twentieth century of those societies that tried to function without them.”

– Paul Heyne, “Efficiency,” in David Henderson, ed., The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics (New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1993), p. 11.

“The wildcatters showed their gratitude to their city through their philanthropy. They were not the only ones who supported good causes in our region, but many of the foundations in Houston had their beginning in the oil and gas industries.”

– Joe Pratt, Cullen/NEH Professor in History and Business, University of Houston

George Will invoked the theme of Texas exceptionalism in a recent column pitching  the state’s governor Rick Perry for the Republican presidential nomination.…

[This factual rebuttal against peak-shale by Chris Tucker and Jeff Eshelman of Energy In Depth (a project of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, or IPAA) is a serious moment in the energy debate. MasterResource reproduces their rebuttal in total and invites comments, particularly from the ‘peak oil’ community that received the front page article of their dreams (or nightmares, depending on the ultimate outcome of this fact-versus-fact debate).]

“What [the New York Times] isn’t entitled to, at least in our view, is to represent its piece as an original investigation; not when the story was essentially outsourced to a well-known critic of the industry whose predictions on shale’s imminent collapse grow less defensible (and more difficult to find on his website) by the day. Nor do we believe The Times is entitled to mislead its readers on the expertise of those whose “leaked” emails — many written in 2008 and 2009 – are used to form the basis of the story, especially when real-world production numbers from 2010 and 2011 directly contradict those speculative accounts.”

[Editor Note: Part I by Mr. Droz examined North Carolina’s proposed offshore wind power development.]

As a citizen of North Carolina and someone with a modicum of energy knowledge, I am particularly interested in how the state is going to handle the approval process of its first industrial wind project (now about two-third’s along).

My ongoing investigation has involved speaking and/or corresponding with about two dozen key state agency people. Most were cooperative and helpful and readily acknowledged that this was new to them. I was appreciative of the fact that most also expressed an interest in being more involved with wind energy approval; but it always came back to the fact that North Carolina has no law that mandated their participation or spelled out their wind energy assessment responsibility.…