“American energy has become remarkably cleaner in the past twenty years; the marketplace, not government mandates, are driving today’s ingenuity in the energy sector; consumer cost and grid reliability are not of less concern than environmental goals; and no sensible energy policy moves us forward by leaving fossil fuels, hydro, and nuclear behind.”
Senator Jeff Bingaman’s Clean Energy Standard (CES) notably improves upon his earlier push to require utilities to generate 20% of their power from renewable sources such as solar and wind power (but not existing hydroelectricity and nuclear power, much less what might emerge from carbon capture technologies at coal plants).
This time around, there is a wider range of energy technologies to bring down the sticker shock of mandating politically correct (but market incorrect) energy to American electricity users.…
Continue Reading“As long as I’m President, we’re going to keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure, and we’re going to do it in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people. We don’t have to choose between one or the other, we can do both.”
Will Obama’s audacious oil play prove to be a Dukakis-in-a-tank moment, as his political opposition believes? Whether it is or not, the climate-alarmist Left is steamed. Why? Because the President’s paean to petroleum sets back the idea that big bad oil is on the way out. Game-set-match for the robust continuing carbon-based energy age.
We have come full circle from George W. Bush’s anti-oil moment in his 2006 State of the Union speech when he opined:
… Continue ReadingWe have a serious problem. America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.
“Without being a trained climate scientist, I can read the various blogs and try to parse the academic papers, but ultimately I have to rely a lot on the good faith and judgment of the scientists themselves. The Heartland affair has reassured my earlier conviction that the case for climate alarmism is far weaker than the alarmists have been telling us.”
As an economist who has done some research on climate change policies, I am often asked questions along the lines of, “Is the science right or is it really a hoax like Rush Limbaugh says?” My standard reply is to acknowledge first of all that I’m not trained in the field, but to say that from my outsider perspective, it seems that the people warning of imminent catastrophe are vastly overrating the likelihood of their dire forecasts.…
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