A Free-Market Energy Blog

‘Beyond Petroleum’ Now ‘Big Promises’ at BP

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 20, 2020

“Many inside the company, including Tony Hayward, had long thought that [John] Browne was distracted by his pet issues of climate change and environmentalism, and by his flirtations with the public spotlight. They thought he had been obsessed with branding the company and lowering its carbon footprint at the expense of BP’s real business, producing and selling oil.” – Abrahm Lustgarden, Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster (2012), p. 203.

“The world’s carbon budget is finite and running out fast. We need a rapid transition to net zero.” – Bernard Looney. CEO, BP, quoted in Financial Times, February 12, 2020

British Petroleum Company, then BP Amoco, then BP, has had a troubled history since it went political in the 1990. That history deserves revisiting given its latest rebranding effort.…

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“Is Biomass Dead?” (niche generator struggles)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 19, 2020

“While the biomass bonanza from plants like Covanta’s in California may be dead, byproducts such as biomethane, and other applications such as the utilization of biomass vegetation to create biochar … do show promise in more selective operations.”

Over the years, posts at MasterResource have documented the environmental problems of wood/plant/garbage-generated electricity, as well as opposition from environmental groups. Biomass is “the air pollution renewable.”

Last summer, Kennedy Maize documented the lost luster of government-enabled waste-to-energy power plants, such as the Wheelabrator plant near Baltimore and the Detroit Renewable Energy plant.

“Waste-to-energy had a 15-year heyday, driven in part by the 1978 Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA),” Maize explained. “The law essentially created the non-utility generating industry.” He continued:

Many local governments had long incinerated garbage to reduce volumes flowing to landfills, but that provoked public opposition due to air pollution.

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Unsettled Science, IPCC-style

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 18, 2020

“It’s never been remotely plausible that [Exxon] did not understand the science.” – Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University), Scientific American, 2015.

“We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they suggest…. [Critics] pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials.” – Allan Jeffers (ExxonMobil) Scientific American, 2015.

The conclusion that the physical science of climate change was “settled” or “proven” in favor of crisis is a major history-of-thought fallacy. Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University (quoted above), must make peace with the quotations below from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as many others, to show that ‘settled science’ on the human influence on climate unambiguously pointed toward alarm.…

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Energy & Environmental Newsletter: February 17, 2020

By -- February 17, 2020
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Cass on Adaptation (the realistic climate policy)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 13, 2020
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Ayn Rand on Energy Disruption (1970s message to Bernie and Bloomberg)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 12, 2020
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’50 Things to Slow Climate Change’ (voluntary today, mandatory tomorrow?)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 11, 2020
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‘Ahuman Manifesto’: The Final Solution to Climate Change

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 10, 2020
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Wind’s PTC Receives 12th Extension (competitive not)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 6, 2020
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Trump: The State of the Union Address (climate unmentioned)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 5, 2020
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