Science Magazine: Remembering a Rare Energy Realism Essay (Best Article Award?)

Today, there is much more political science than science in the editorial content of the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AAAS has become just another special-interest, at the trough of special government favor. So why not, for example, tilt toward exaggeration on big-money research issues like the prospective impact of the human influence on climate?

Recent evidence of the political nature of the scientific community was produced when Al Gore received a standing ovation at the conclusion of his presentation at the annual convention of AAAS in Chicago. Yet Gore has gone far beyond mainstream science to sound the climate alarm, and scientists know it. They just like his politics, because it allows them to act as rent-seekers rather than truth-seekers. Roger Pielke Jr.…

ExxonMobil’s Tillerson on Renewable Energy: Realism amid Politics

As reported by Russell Gold at Environmental Capital, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson has made an incisive new argument against his company’s investing in government-dependent renewable energy.

“If I wanted to kill [tax subsidies], the thing to do is for Exxon Mobil to go and invest heavily in them and then Congress would immediately cancel the tax subsidy. Actually what they would do is they would just cancel it for us,” said Mr.Tillerson, during the annual analyst meeting at the New York Stock Exchange.

He added: “In reality, that is what I fear would happen. So we are not going to go into investments that are dependent on a government providing a tax system to make them viable.”

This is very interesting. Former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond and now Tillerson have argued against investing in politically dependent renewables because they have been-there-done-that, with investor losses in the 1970s.…

Wind: Energy Past, not Energy Future (the intermittency curse then, as now)

The disadvantage of windpower as a primary energy source has been long recognized. This 1838 textbook described the competitive situation of wind as follows:

 William Stanley Jevons also detailed the problems of windpower…

The Malthusian Wing of the Party in Power: When Will They Speak Up?

Solar Hyperbole 2009: Don’t Forget Enron/Solarex circa 1994

Beware of the New “Limits to Growth” (and looking for ReaganVision/CarterVision)

Thomas Edison to Henry Ford: Forget Electric Cars (Is this advice from 1896 still relevant?)

CERAWeek 2009: Why Didn’t Daniel Yergin Question Climate Alarmism–and Both Cap-and-Trade and Carbon Taxation?

Windpower: Yet Another Texas-sized Problem (Hurricane Risk)

John Holdren Told “Not to Make News” at his Confirmation Hearing