Ed. note: This post excerpts energy and climate material from the Media Balance Newsletter, a fortnightly published by physicist John Droz Jr., founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions. The complete MBN for this post can be found here.

Greed Energy Economics:
*** The Often Overlooked Costs of an Extended Power Outage

Renewables (General):
*** Why Pretend Green Pork Will Stop Climate Change?
*** What The Future Holds For Our Climate Leaders
*** All That Glitters Isn’t Green, or Renewable
*** Unattainable, Costly, Net Zero: the Thrill is Gone; a black/brown-out reality check
*** Wind and Solar Fail to Reduce Grid’s CO2 Emissions
*** MISO approves $10 billion in new transmission lines to subsidize wind and solar
‘Green’ Energy Myth Exposed: Subsidized Wind & Solar Scam Built on Perpetual Lies
Heatwave Demonstrates Weakness of New York’s Electric Grid
Rights Abuser China Emerging as Dubious Linchpin of Biden’s Lithium-Battery Supply Chain
Why Panos Prevedouros left Hawaii

Wind Energy (Offshore):
*** Biden announces executive actions on ‘climate crisis,’ focuses on extreme heat and boosting offshore wind
*** Offshore wind turbines have never been a good idea
*** Offshore Wind’s Turbulent Future
Five Reasons To Reject Offshore Wind Projects
The Offshore Wind Energy Problem: Government Overregulation, Disincentives, and Anti-market Policies

Wind Energy (Other):
Developer Abandons Plan to Add 30 Wind Turbines in Iowa: Residents Celebrate

Solar Energy:
*** Weather ‘too hot’ for solar panels
*** How Manchin-Schumer would change energy, from oil to solar
*** The Energy Transition Runs Into a Ditch in Rural Ohio
Farmland Be Damned: New York Will Cover Upstate with Solar!…

“… fossil fuels are a convenient, condensed source of energy that has helped raise living standards throughout much of the world.”

“We must all be aware that demands for effective policies will yield only superficial change as long as the role of special interests in government remains unaddressed.” (- James Hansen)

James Hansen speaks truth to power in a number of areas regarding energy and climate. There is a lot to like. But when it comes to public policy, he refuses to go where his sober analysis tells him. He is not ready to make a tectonic shift toward adaptation rather than mitigation, despite the latter’s impossible economic and policy math.

“Magical Thinking”

Magical thinking has plagued climate policy. Vaclav Smil has explained the problem with little pushback. Smil, in fact, is in the mainstream as shown by the NYT’s April 2022 article, “This Eminent Scientist Says Climate Activists Need to Get Real.”…

“[J]ust 1 percent of voters in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll named climate change as the most important issue facing the country, far behind worries about inflation and the economy. Even among voters under 30, the group thought to be most energized by the issue, that figure was 3 percent.” (NYT, Below)

Climate anxiety or climate realism? The stark choice becomes more apparent every day as climate alarmists lick their wounds at political failure. So what is the next move for those who refuse to rethink their position, to believe the data rather than the models? One guess is to get the climate modelers to tweak a few things to then conclude, “Oh, we have more time than we thought to achieve Net Zero.”

Fifty years ago, two key Club of Rome/Limits to Growth authors retreated to their New Hampshire farm “to learn about homesteading and wait for the coming collapse.”…

“Unsurprisingly, just as in Sri Lanka, the Dutch announcement has created political upheaval. What is surprising is that, in the face of all this, politicians in countries like Belgium and New Zealand want to follow suit.” 

As Benjamin Franklin once quipped, “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that.” Unfortunately, experience is often painful and occasionally fatal. Even the most foolish, if they survive, can learn from their own mistakes, but the wise learn from the mistakes of others.

Sri Lanka has made a catastrophic mistake. In 2021, during the 26^th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced that his country had embarked on a “new agricultural revolution that has sustainability at its core.”…