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:
*** Backup battery cost fantasies abound
*** Runaway energy prices require a green energy rethink
1000s Of Sydney Homes Plunged Into Darkness As Aussie ‘Price Cap’ Policy Sparks Energy Shortage
Upstate New York will foot the bill for downstate’s clean energy costs

Renewables (General):
*** Clean Green Energy – Net Zero – Fairy Tales on Steroids
*** Renewable Energy — or Reliable Energy — But Not Both
*** The Biden Admin Wants Censorship Of Renewable Energy Critics
*** In the dark on the power struggle: inconvenient truth proves renewables can’t cut it
How will hydropower bolster a renewable energy world?…

“Today, the libertarian Cato Institute releases its “Policy Handbook for the 104^th Congress,” a 39-essay proposal to dismantle the federal government…. The essay on energy was written by Cato camp follower Robert L. Bradley Jr. of Houston … president of his own energy think tank – well, OK, it’s small, more like a think bucket – called the Institute for Energy Research.”

How the energy debate has shifted in the last quarter-century–with the middle moving Left and the free market, classical liberal Right falling off the table. Today, the Green Party has been neutered by the Progressive (or Regressive, as Alex Epstein puts it) Left dictating the debate.

I was reminded of this upon encountering an old ‘Perspectives’ column from John H. Jennrich, the founder and editor of Natural Gas Week.…

“Government does not solve problems. It subsidizes them.” (Ronald Reagan)

“The purpose of the social sciences is to impart reliable information to both understand reality and avoid problems before they occur. But here we are with a faulty shared narrative. And the public is catching on with electricity, as they already have with transportation.” (RLB, below)

E&E News is the media center for the cause of (government-driven) energy transformation. Its many reporters assume but do not debate climate alarmism, the necessary but not sufficient premise behind the wind/solar/battery cause. Still, E&E reporters are looking for interesting stories and report on some of the problems of the “transition.” That gets to energy reality.

This Monday’s article, “California Dilemma,” mainstreams the fact that politically correct renewables are expensive, unreliable, and problematic at scale.…

I am writing a new book, Energy Crisis and Leviathan, that summarizes the history of government intervention with energy during wartime and other energy emergencies. To better understand these crises, I review the intervening periods of relative normalcy.

My effort is not a treatise but an overview that relies on key political economy terms to best understand the unhampered market process versus interventionism. The terms below will be referred to in future posts here at MasterResource given the current energy emergencies and habit of government to expand rather than contract.

This is a working draft. The reader is invited to suggest, correct, or present new terms to this list of 21.

Border adjustments: Nation-to-nation tariffs to prevent some jurisdictions from disadvantaging others in the global quest to price or ration carbon dioxide.…