When will Democrats and true environmentalists wake up to windpower, or what Robert Bryce calls the ethanol of electricity? Industrial wind is a scam when seen in all of its dimensions–economic, environmental, and esthetic. Bryce has identified five myths of green energy–and post after post at MasterResource by Kent Hawkins, Jon Boone, and John Droz Jr. have shown that meaningful CO2 reductions from windpower are highly debatable.
Industrial wind is chock full of environmental negatives and isn’t nearly as effective at reducing air emissions than advertised. Big Wind is corporate welfare with companies like GE and FPL skipping their federal taxes. Wind today is the legacy of Enron, the Ken Lay model of political capitalism. Wind is an assault on lower-income energy users, not only taxpayers.…
Editor Note: This post complements a previous entry at MasterResource by Guillermo Yeatts,
Subsoil Oil and Gas Privatization: Private Wealth for the Common Good.]
Government intervention in free markets is prefaced on market failure. But no such rationale explains why federal and state governments have owned and managed hydrocarbon-bearing onshore and offshore lands. Government involvement can be explained by little more than the historical precedent of sovereign ownership of unowned property and of habit.
In a private property world, surface and subsurface areas would be unowned until the positive acts of discovery and intent to use. Under the “homestead” theory of first property title, the state of nature (unowned area) would not be the property of government but the first resource entrepreneur who, in the immortal words of John Locke, “tills, plants, improves, cultivates and can use the product of” the surface or subsurface to “enclose it from the common.”…
“I am not afraid about the climate.”
– Judith Curry, quoted in Alexandre Mansur, “American Researcher Says That There Is Still a lot of Uncertainty About Global Warming, Época, May 1, 2010.
“Real Climate, I think they’ve damaged their brand. They started out doing something that people liked, but they’ve been too partisan in a scientific way.”
– Judith Curry, quoted in Eric Berger, “Judith Curry: On Antarctic sea ice, Climategate and skeptics.” August 18, 2010.
There is solid middle ground in the ever-contentious climate-change debate. And now is the time to welcome it, given that politics is not going to reverse in any detectable amount the human influence on climate.
And the shame of the post-Climategate era is that other scientists like Curry did not join her to right the wrongs of a profession that has become politicized, agendacized, and Malthusiancized.…