“Today’s reserve and resource estimates should be considered a minimum, not a maximum. By the end of the forecast period, reserves could be the same or higher depending on technological developments, capital availability, public policies, and commodity price levels.”
“The implication for business decision-making and public-policy analysis is that ‘depletable’ is not an operative concept for the world oil market, as it might be for an individual well, field, or geographical section…. [T]he concept of a nonrenewable resource is a heuristic, pedagogical device—an ideal type—not a principle that entrepreneurs can turn into profits and government officials can parlay into enlightened intervention.”
This essay, published by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in the November 1999 issue of The Freeman, was subtitled, “Today’s Reserve and Resource Estimates Should Be Considered a Minimum.”…
Continue Reading“The Senate bill should serve as the PTC/ITC blueprint for the final bill…. [Such reform] is an important step, but only first step, toward a level-playing-field between electrical energies that will, longer term, improve grid reliability coast-to-coast, border-to-border.”
After 25-years of subsidy-driven financing, the wind industry is entirely reliant on tax-equity investors, willing to accept tax credits in return for funding a significant percentage of their project costs. Tax equity now accounts for up to 60% of the capital needed to construct a typical wind facility. The pool of investors with enough passive income to qualify for wind PTCs is limited and includes the largest financial institutions such as JP Morgan, Bank of American, Citi and even Google.
Said bluntly, Main Street Americans are coughing up billions annually to help the richest Wall Street bankers avoid paying their taxes.…
Continue Reading… Continue Reading“… we don’t have a first-principles theory that tells us what we have to get right in order to have an accurate projection [of anthropogenic climate change]…. This is sort of an emergent knowledge base. So, that’s the translation of this last statement, ‘To date, a set of diagnostics and performance metrics that can strongly reduce uncertainties in global climate sensitivity,’ a la projections, ‘has yet to be identified’.” (p. 89)
“… if the [temperature] hiatus is still going on as of the sixth IPCC report, that report is going to have a large burden on its shoulders walking in the door, because recent literature has shown that the chances of having a hiatus 18 of 20 years are vanishingly small.” (p. 92)
– William Collins, Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.