“When clean alternatives become cheaper, cleaner, more reliable, and more secure, fossil fuel demand collapses – inevitably.” – Lisa Sachs, below

We are back to the 1970s where magical thinking about ‘negawatts’ and the impending competitiveness of solar and wind as grid electricity was the order of the day. Think Jimmy Carter. The U.S. Department of Energy. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Even Synthetic Fuels.

Lisa Sachs of Columbia University, daughter of Jeffrey Sachs, recently posted this as if failed COP30 did not matter. Is she classically ‘in denial’?

The Real Way We Phase Out Fossil Fuels … And It’s Not Through Pledges.

There’s frustration that COP30 didn’t deliver a stronger “phaseout” statement. I understand it, but we’re focused on the wrong lever. Fossil fuels don’t disappear because negotiators agree to it.…

Ed. Note: With COP30 under way, it is an opportune time consider the opportunity cost to climate statism. The alternative represents true social justice and energy plenty in a sea of freedom. This repost from two years ago outlines the most important global energy issue of our time.

“The case of Guillermo Yeatts for subsoil privatization should eclipse ‘climate change’ as the number one policy initiative of the 21st century. This friend of private property, free markets, the rule of law, and civil society, a successful entrepreneur in his own right, a thinker and doer, has set up an excellent opportunity for a new political era in his beloved Argentina.”

Give me liberty, not corruption and poverty! The recent election of Javier Milei of La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances) in Argentina was a resounding vote for freedom and prosperity.…

This post excerpts energy and climate material from the Media Balance Newsletter, a free fortnightly published by physicist John Droz Jr., founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions. Droz is also the author of the popular Substack Critically Thinking About Select Societal Issues.

Greed Energy Economics:
New York’s climate law hits the wall

Unreliables Energy Health and Ecosystem Consequences:
*** RFKJr directs CDC to study alleged harms of offshore wind farms
*** Shocking New Report Lays Out the Full Scale of Environmental Damage Caused by Onshore Wind Turbines

Unreliables (General):
*** Wind & Solar: Too Good to Be True
*** The Environmental Disaster of Wind and Solar

Wind Energy — Offshore:
US’s first offshore wind installation vessel ‘fails to deliver’ as launch delayed

Nuclear Energy:
*** Why Does the World Ignore Nuclear Power?…

“The siren song of inexpensive nuclear power continues into its seventh decade. Taxpayer and ratepayers beware.”

Commercial nuclear power has turned into the welfare energy de jure. It is politically correct despite many decades of failure to compete against other forms of thermal energy. Uranium might be the ultimate energy density-wise, but nuclear fission (and more so nuclear fusion) is the most complicated, expensive, fraught way to boil water.

Commercial nuclear power was government-created in the 1950s and remains government dependent today. (Stay tuned: my primer on the history of this energy source is forthcoming. [1]). Regarding the present, consider this example from Jamie Smyth, editor of US Energy, who wrote:

Nuclear technology company Oklo has no revenues, no licence to operate reactors and no binding contracts to supply power.