One of the nation’s important energy analysts is Michael Giberson, an economist at the Center for Energy Commerce in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University. Giberson, who has occasionally posted at MasterResource, teaches energy courses at Tech such as U.S. Energy Policy and Regulation and Energy Economics.
Giberson is also a principal (with fellow energy expert Lynne Kiesling of Northwestern University) of the energy-centric Knowledge Problem, described as “Commentary on Economics, Information, and Human Action.”
A month ago, Giberson critically reviewed a study by the Breakthrough Institute that claimed, basically, that government energy activism crucially enabled the shale gas (and oil) revolution that is now sweeping much of the United States and many countries around the world.
“New Investigation Finds Decades of Government Funding Behind Shale Revolution,” announced Breakthrough on December 20, adding:
… Continue ReadingBreakthrough Institute research and interviews show the direct and sustained support federal agencies provided to the gas industry leading up to the modern natural gas revolution.
“[D]emagogues and bad economists are presenting half-truths. They are speaking only of the immediate effect of a proposed policy or its effect upon a single group…. [The correction is] showing that the proposed policy would also have longer and less desirable effects, or that it could benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups.”
– Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, p. 6.
There are many analyses of the President’s address to the nation last night. As last year, Obama has opened himself up to ridicule and parody (see what MasterResource did).
For this year, in what could well be his last such speech, MasterResource presents timeless logic to unmask the fallacies spewed by our quick-fix, anti-market commander-in-chief.
“Green jobs’? The government-created ones for industrial windpower and for on-grid solar power?…
Continue Reading“The release of energy from splitting a uranium atom turns out to be 2 million times greater than breaking the carbon-hydrogen bond in coal, oil or wood. Compared to all the forms of energy ever employed by humanity, nuclear power is off the scale. Wind has less than 1/10th the energy density of wood, wood half the density of coal, and coal half the density of octane. Altogether they differ by a factor of about 50. Nuclear has 2 million times the energy density of gasoline. It is hard to fathom this in light of our previous experience. Yet our energy future largely depends on grasping the significance of this differential. “
– William Tucker, excerpted from his lecture, Understanding E=MC2
William Tucker has powerfully explained how the future of technologically advanced civilizations depends upon a sophisticated ability to convert the highest energy densities into increasingly denser power performance, and in the process compacting the time and space necessary to do productive work.…
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