“During Human Achievement Hour, enjoy the benefits of capitalism and human innovation. To celebrate participants need only to spend the 8:30pm to 9:30pm hour on March 31 enjoying the benefits of free enterprise and human innovation: gather with friends in the warmth of a heated home, watch television, take a hot shower, drink a beer, call a loved one on the phone, or listen to music.”
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is a feisty bunch. Their global warming realism team of Marlo Lewis, Myron Ebell, Chris Horner, and William Yeatman is crack.
And really, who would you rather have a beer with: Marlo Lewis or that guy Joe Romm over at Climate Progress? Heck, Marlo might bring his Mandolin and Old Town Tradition band to entertain you!
I think we win the ‘good guys’ award in the highly contentious global warming debate, not only the intellectual case for climate livability and public policy inactivism.…
“As long as I’m President, we’re going to keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure, and we’re going to do it in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people. We don’t have to choose between one or the other, we can do both.”
Will Obama’s audacious oil play prove to be a Dukakis-in-a-tank moment, as his political opposition believes? Whether it is or not, the climate-alarmist Left is steamed. Why? Because the President’s paean to petroleum sets back the idea that big bad oil is on the way out. Game-set-match for the robust continuing carbon-based energy age.
We have come full circle from George W. Bush’s anti-oil moment in his 2006 State of the Union speech when he opined:
…We have a serious problem. America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.
“The range of energy possibilities grouped under the heading ‘solar’ could meet one-fifth of U.S. energy needs within two decades.”
– Robert Stobaugh and Daniel Yergin, “The End of Easy Oil,” in Stobaugh and Yergin, eds., Energy Future, Report of the Energy Project of the Harvard Business School (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 12.
”I think … the consensus … is after the year 2000, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of our energy could come from solar technologies, quite easily.”
– Scott Sklar, Solar Energy Industries Association (1987).
“Before maybe the end of this decade, I see wind and solar being cost-competitive without subsidy with new fossil fuel.”
– DOE Secretary Stephan Chu, Address to Pew Charitable Trusts, March 23, 2011.
Yesterday’s Part I on the long history of solar power ended with two quotations from energy historian Wilson Clark in his 1974 book, Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction:
…“In 1908, [Frank] Shuman formed the Sun Power Company and convinced English financiers to back his efforts to build larger plants using the flat-plate collectors.