The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual worldwide celebration of human progress is tomorrow, March 19th. Turn on the lights and celebrate the wondrous ability of natural gas, coal, and oil to overcome Obama energy policy and forced renewable penetration to keep the lights on in despite-all fairly affordable way.
As CEI explains:
… Continue ReadingHuman Achievement Hour is a time to celebrate innovations that help us all live better, fuller lives. Human Achievement Hour is also the counter-event to Earth Hour, where participants symbolically renounce the environmental impacts of modern technology by turning off their lights for an hour. We believe it’s a misguided effort that ignores how access to affordable energy helps people around the world.
How to celebrate with us? Share your favorite human achievement or innovation that makes your life easier!
“For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels.”
– Vaclav Smil, “What I See When I See a Wind Turbine (March 2016).
Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, has published 37 books and almost 500 papers on “the fields of energy, environmental and population change, food production and nutrition, technical innovation, risk assessment, and public policy.”
One of the great energy experts of our age, Smil’s output easily rivals whole US Department of Energy laboratories which, incidentally, are easy candidates for elimination under a new political regime.
This month, Dr. Smil’s published a short piece in IEEE Spectrum titled “What I See When I See a Wind Turbine.”…
Continue Reading[Editor Note: MasterResource publishes a variety of energy- and classical liberal-related essays. We are not afraid of the pursuit of truth and certainly have found it. This post by Marc Rauch, vice-president and copublisher of The Auto Channel, presents a provocative thesis about how ethanol was blocked by government policy (taxation and then Prohibition) from capturing major energy markets more than a century ago. Comments are particularly welcome.]
Debates today rage over the ethanol mandate. Be that what it may, there is a market niche for ethanol as an anti-knock agent and an oxygenate to meet clean air standards. But did you know that a market for ethanol, a free-market market, existed or could have developed except for the unintended consequences of a major government intervention?
Prohibitive Taxation
Events of the American Civil War set in stone social and economic conditions that have been with us ever since, and they are certain to be with us long into the foreseeable future. …
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