In the 2000s, I helped persuade the Obama administration to make a big investment in clean energy, won the “Green Book Award,” and was named a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” for my writings on climate change.
“… fossil fuels replenished slavery’s ranks with combustion engines and other labor-saving tools. Since then, cheap oil has transformed politics, economics, science, agriculture, and even our concept of happiness. Many North Americans today live as extravagantly as Caribbean plantation owners. We feel entitled to surplus energy and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. But endless growth is an illusion.”
– Andrew Nikiforuk. The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude (Greystone Books, 2012), book synopsis.
“The evolution of fracking technology would not have surprised Jacques Ellul. In his final book on the subject, The Technological Bluff, the Christian philosopher argued that the rapid adoption of techniques from computers to genetic engineering generates totalitarian discourses.”
– Andrew Nikiforuk. Slick Water: Fracking (Greystone Books, 2015), p. 309.
Here at MasterResource, opposing views are considered thoroughly.
…“Michael Shellenberger needs to go Alex Epstein. He must explain the fundamental energy concepts of density and intermittency in his political quest in the Golden State…. He must differentiate between global lukewarming and catastrophic warming from the enhanced greenhouse effect. The war on fossil fuels must end in California.”
Michael Shellenberger, founder and president of Environmental Progress, is running for Governor of California. Energy is his major campaign issue for a state that is in energy trouble. But he must properly finish what he has started–even to the point of speaking political incorrectness to power.
“I am a lifelong Democrat and have worked for progressive causes all of my life.” So begins the “About” section of Michael Shellenberger’s website for his run for California’s governorship. A resident of Berkeley, he touts his credentials as a Progressive Democrat:
In the 2000s, I helped persuade the Obama administration to make a big investment in clean energy, won the “Green Book Award,” and was named a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” for my writings on climate change.
“In DOE’s ostensible energy efficiency zealousness, it assumes ‘command and control’ of a portion of the economy. Such political markets inevitably displace free markets, as vested interests organize and mobilize resources to protect and enlarge their abilities, against less powerful stakeholders, to determine regulatory outcomes.”
In 1999, “Is DOE Leading Us Astray?” was published in a business trade journal. That journal no longer exists, but my article’s message can be revisited to assess how the current situation.
The original is indented and in red, followed by my responses: [1]
…When you do the math, properly accounting for the delivered efficiency of the two energy forms, one sees that electricity is delivered at an overall efficiency of 27% and natural gas is delivered at an overall efficiency of 91% (using the above illustrative EFs).