“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.…
Continue Reading“The range of energy possibilities grouped under the heading ‘solar’ could meet one-fifth of U.S. energy needs within two decades.”
– Robert Stobaugh and Daniel Yergin, “The End of Easy Oil,” in Stobaugh and Yergin, eds., Energy Future, Report of the Energy Project of the Harvard Business School (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 12.
”I think … the consensus … is after the year 2000, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of our energy could come from solar technologies, quite easily.”
– Scott Sklar, Solar Energy Industries Association (1987).
“Before maybe the end of this decade, I see wind and solar being cost-competitive without subsidy with new fossil fuel.”
– DOE Secretary Stephan Chu, Address to Pew Charitable Trusts, March 23, 2011.
Yesterday’s Part I on the long history of solar power ended with two quotations from energy historian Wilson Clark in his 1974 book, Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction:
… Continue Reading“In 1908, [Frank] Shuman formed the Sun Power Company and convinced English financiers to back his efforts to build larger plants using the flat-plate collectors.