A Free-Market Energy Blog

"Green Job" Fallacies (Part I: First Principles)

By -- September 28, 2011

[Ed. note: The following is excerpted from Dr. Michaels’s recent testimony before the Subcommittee on Water and Power. Part II tomorrow will examine how green jobs are defined by their proponents.]

It is rapidly becoming apparent that renewable energy is failing to produce the promise of painless prosperity embodied in “green jobs” that will simultaneously decrease unemployment rates and reduce pollution.  Begin with some principles:

1.  The proper goal of energy policy is to support the efficient provision of energy. 

The lower the cost of energy to the economy, all else equal, the higher will be job creation and economic growth outside of the energy sector.  Raising energy costs by forcing the use of uneconomic technologies that create more job slots will have exactly the opposite effect.  Put simply, more workers in energy reduce the production of non-energy goods and services.

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Lindzen on Kerry Emanuel's Climate Alarmism, Non-Sequitur

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- September 27, 2011

When I was director of public policy analysis at Enron in the late 1990s, I hired climatologist Gerald North of Texas A&M as a consultant to help me get to the bottom of the raging debate between climate ‘skeptics’ and ‘alarmists.’ I was Ken Lay’s speechwriter, and I was concerned that Enron’s embrace of climate alarmism (we had seven profit centers banking on priced CO2 from government intervention) was intellectually off base and thus violated the honesty plank of corporate responsibility.

It was money well spent. Dr. North was personable and honest, although he had a propensity to default toward alarmism if you did not challenge him. (Such is the neo-Malthusian propensity of most natural scientists who see nature as optimal and the human influence as only downside.) This is why I have called Dr.…

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Wind Energy and Radar: A National Security Issue

By -- September 26, 2011

Military leaders are under pressure to not disrupt White House green energy policies even while green energy technology is disrupting our navigation aids and impairing U.S. national security.

Washington has a track record of muzzling military testimony to protect its pet policies and political friends. Last week, Air Force Gen. William Shelton admitted he was pressured by the administration to change his testimony regarding LightSquared’s network and its adverse impact on military space-based navigation systems. We applaud Shelton for not bowing to the pressure.

But the military has not been honest about the effect wind turbine technology has on our national radar systems.

The fact is that our air space has been made less safe by turbines and our national security compromised because of a reckless policy of siting wind towers within 50-miles of radar installations. …

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Go Industrial, Not 'Green' (Part II)

By -- September 24, 2011
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Go Industrial, Not 'Green' (Part I)

By -- September 23, 2011
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Unlearned Cap-and-Trade Lessons: EPA's Problematic Cross-State Air Pollution Rule

By Roger Calazza -- September 22, 2011
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Biomass vs. Fossil Fuels: Thinking of CO2 Emissions in Terms of Nature’s “Battery”

By Indur Goklany -- September 21, 2011
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Solar circa 1994: What Has Really Changed? (Remembering Enron's hoodwink in the age of Solyndra)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- September 20, 2011
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State Climatologist of Georgia Ousting: Was It Justified? ('Skepticism', not only alarmism, can get political)

By Chip Knappenberger -- September 19, 2011
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Domestic Oil & Gas Production: America's Hadrian Wall

By Gary Hunt -- September 15, 2011
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