Posts from — February 2009

As I posted at the Pacific Research Institute website, the California State Lands Commission (SLC) has rejected a proposal that would have led to the first new oil drilling project off the California coast in 40 years. On January 29, the panel voted 2-1 against Plains Exploration & Production Company’s request for approval of its bid to expand drilling off Platform Irene in the Santa Barbara Channel.

The swing vote was California Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi, who also serves as SLC Chairman.  Mr. Garamendi had earlier signaled his approval, [Read more →]

Chris Horner’s Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed (Regnery, 2008) documents a number of instances of questionable, peculiar, and even reprehensible behavior by climate alarmists toward their critics.

And the problem continues. [Read more →]

Can there be a Kyoto II without China, India, and the other developing countries getting on board with significant greenhouse-gas emissions reductions? Voices of realism, knowing that consumer and economic factors drive public opinion, doubt it. But there are less realistic voices too. [Read more →]

Ken Green’s post on California’s global-warming policy commented on the sad state of California’s economy under the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (Assembly Bill 32, or AB 32) . This raises the question: What is California climatically achieving for its sacrifice?

The answer? Even an immediate and complete cessation of all greenhouse gas emissions from California now and forever would result in no meaningful impact on the future course of climate change. [Read more →]

People who use the phrase “homes served” to describe the potential output from one or more wind turbines either do not understand the facts about wind turbines, believe false claims put forth by the wind industry, or are trying to mislead their reader or listener.

False statements about “homes served” by wind developers and their lobbyists are bad enough, but it is discouraging to hear politicians, reporters, and others adopt and regurgitate them. [Read more →]

As a fuel source, coal is a different product from what it was in past decades. Specifically, it is much cleaner. Yet, as always, it is much cheaper and more reliable than renewables such as wind and solar. In the generation of electricity, its real competition is natural gas.

In short, coal looks to remain a mainstay in the domestic energy mix and bodes to help defeat the Malthusian anti-energy crusade.

In a recent edition of EnergyBiz Magazine, Lee Buchsbaum reports on a 1,600 megawatt plant now being built in Illinois by Peabody Energy, the world’s largest publicly traded coal-mining company. When completed in 2012, the project will satisfy the power needs of as many as 2.4 million homes in nine or more states. The giant greenfield plant is a real stimulus plan that helps consumers and injects taxes rather than uses taxes. Reports Buchsbaum: [Read more →]

It’s easy to bash coal. There’s no romance in the black rocks that provide about half of the electricity in the United States and about 28.6 percent of the world’s total primary energy. And that bashing has become easier still in recent weeks. A few days before Christmas, at a power plant operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, a huge holding pond failed, spilling coal ash contaminated with a variety of heavy metals including arsenic, lead, barium, chromium and manganese over several hundred acres.[1] On December 29, James Hansen, the high-profile NASA scientist who is closely aligned with former vice president Al Gore on the issue of global warming, sent an open letter to President-elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, in which he called coal-fired power plants “factories of death.”[2]

Add in coal’s other environmental problems—mining by mountain-top removal, air pollution in the form of sulfur dioxide and heavy metals, and heavy loads of particulate—and coal looks pretty bad.

But here’s the problem: some of the world’s biggest economies—and that includes America’s—are heavily dependent on coal. [Read more →]

After agreement was reached in December 1997 on the Kyoto Protocol, its supporters pronounced that major carbon reductions were feasible and probable. Just do it, as the Nike commercial said. Build it and they will come, as the Field of Dreams movie said. And during the eight years of George W. Bush, Kyoto supporters complained mightily that we were leaving dollars on the ground, so to speak, while running out of climate and time.

Now under Obama [Read more →]

One hopes, as Obama constructs his energy and climate policy, that someone points him to an interesting article by Stephen Moore in the Wall Street Journal. In the article, Moore points out something that I experienced first-hand in California and that, in fact, guided me into a career in economic and environmental policy. What I noticed, [Read more →]

Two quotations circa 1971 are germane to a final stocktaking of failed alarmist John Holdren. Both come from the introduction to Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, eds., Global Ecology (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971): [Read more →]