Ed note: This article overviews the growth of renewables over the last 20 years from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Annual Energy Review. For convenience, the DOE tables are converted to watts (W), in its billion multiple the gigawatt (GW). The same unit for both generation and consumption enables straightforward comparisons among various efficiencies, capacity factors, site factors, etc. Conversion factors such as Cal, cal, joule, Btu, Wh, each per second, hour, or year, is defined at the end. [1]
“The wind and solar industry claims employment … at about 250 000 jobs. The relative productivity per employee is thus 7.5 kW with solar, and 32 kW with wind. Compare that to 1,300 kW with fossil fuels, and 2,000 kW with nuclear.”
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) lists six significant sources of renewable energy: Wind, Solar, Hydro, Wood, Waste, and Geothermal.…
Continue Reading” … with adaptation, total costs will be much smaller than the headline-grabbing numbers that climate economists and our government agencies choose to highlight, and with future growth our society will be far better equipped to handle them.” (- Oren Cass, June 2019)
While government mitigation policies flounder and add waste to waste, market adaptation quietly internalizes the alleged negative externality of the human influence on global climate. Part of this influence is increased precipitation and flooding from a warmer world where the air holds more moister from the evaporation below.
MasterResource has reported from time to time on the almost invisible, ongoing climate/weather adaptation process, the unhampered market in action (see Appendix).
Tabasco Plant (2019)
One example that caught my eye a few years back was the McIlhenny Company constructing a 20-foot levee around its Tabasco plant on Avery Island off the Louisiana coast to insure against flooding.…
Continue ReadingBack in December 2015, I submitted an editorial to the Houston Chronicle that they published in their edition to the suburbs–but not Houston proper. The fix was in; this would be one of the last editrials I would have published at a major suburban newspaper that went Left, far Left.
In the buildup to the Nov. 30-Dec. 11 United Nations climate summit in Paris, climate alarmists tried to end intellectual debate over the enhanced greenhouse effect. This is the 28th year of the climate crusade to globally cap industrial life.
The secular religion of climate “stabilization” did not arise from nowhere. It emerged in the same period as the discrediting of the Malthusian mainstays of depletion and pollution, as well as the discrediting of socialism/central planning. As such, it has been a savior for government control of economic life, or statism.…
Continue Reading