“One of the chief hurdles is bringing reliable, affordable electricity to all the people of India. Uninterrupted electricity is still a luxury that few Indians enjoy.”
Environmental activism can delay or even stop development projects in developing countries. Not all of it is wrong, but more and more of it is, especially concerning hydrocarbon-based power plants in developing (and developed) countries.
I live in India. With a population of 1.3 billion, nearly 300 million live in poverty, excruciating poverty compared to Western living standards.
India is in a race against time to achieve economic progress. In the past three decades its economy has grown by leaps and bounds, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. Yet it has a long way to go before it can become like nations in the developed West.…
Continue Reading“A reliable worldview, respect for data, and humility in the face of the unknown allow older writings to have longevity and relevance. I believe that the above summary has held up well as the climate debate enters its fourth decade. I predict that fossil fuels will outlive and overcome the current attack just as was done back in the 1970s.”
In 2003, I published a booklet for the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in London, Climate Alarmism Reconsidered. Written 15 years after James Hansen’s climate-scare testimony, and 16 years before Joe Biden’s ‘climate day‘ yesterday, I present the summary bullets of that study.
The ten points follow:
… Continue Reading• The energy sustainability issues of resource depletion, reliability (security) and pollution have been effectively addressed by market entrepreneurship, technology, and, in the absence of private property rights, measured regulation.
“Though big businesses and local governments–especially those that want to build more solar and wind farms–will spend millions on lobbyists to overcome opposition to their handouts, those in charge of Texas’ purse strings may decide that this is the time to draw them a little tighter.”
Wind has dominated Texas’ renewable energy landscape for the last 20 years. However, solar is making a concerted effort to catch up. Utility-scale solar capacity almost doubled in 2020, topping 8,000 gigawatt hours.
Texas, which already leads the nation in wind capacity, is moving up the ranks of U.S. states in terms in solar capacity. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, Texas ranked third in 2019, with enough generation installed on solar farms to power 642,199 homes (abstracting from solar’s intermittency).
Favorable press releases are one thing.…
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