A Free-Market Energy Blog

“Wind Power Won’t Cool Down the Planet” (Robert Bryce exposes windpower’s dirty secret)

By Kent Hawkins -- August 30, 2010

Robert Bryce continues to bear down on the failure of wind as a useful and beneficial source of utility-scale electricity, as shown in his recent Wall Street Journal article. (The full text is available on Bryce’s website and is provided below for convenience.)

In his latest book, Power Hungry; The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, Bryce detailed the rationale underlying the inadequacies of renewables, especially wind, and their inability to make any worthwhile contribution to inexpensive, reliable electricity supply or “save the planet.”

Research into this topic is expanding (see this review of 2010 study by Peter Lang) beyond existing vague, high-level, general analyses that do not account for all the factors at play in integrating intermittent and volatile wind into an electricity grid.…

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Judith Curry Looks for Middle Ground in the Contentious Climate Debate (Jerry North, can you help her?)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 27, 2010

“I am not afraid about the climate.”

– Judith Curry, quoted in Alexandre Mansur, “American Researcher Says That There Is Still a lot of Uncertainty About Global Warming, Época, May 1, 2010.

“Real Climate, I think they’ve damaged their brand. They started out doing something that people liked, but they’ve been too partisan in a scientific way.”

– Judith Curry, quoted in Eric Berger, “Judith Curry: On Antarctic sea ice, Climategate and skeptics.” August 18, 2010.

There is solid middle ground in the ever-contentious climate-change debate. And now is the time to welcome it, given that politics is not going to reverse in any detectable amount the human influence on climate.

And the shame of the post-Climategate era is that other scientists like Curry did not join her to right the wrongs of a profession that has become politicized, agendacized, and Malthusiancized.

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Latest on the Death Spiral of Climate Alarmism (Is it time to focus on real environmental problems and not CO2?)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 26, 2010

Ken Green at MasterResource published an influential post, The Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism Continues (June 2, 2010), that began with two quotations:

“We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

– James Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006.

“Desperation is setting in among climate alarmists who by their own math can see that the window is rapidly closing on ’saving the planet’.”

– Kenneth Green, ”A Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism, Redux?” MasterResource, September 30, 2009.

And what was true in June is even more true today as the failure to price carbon dioxide (CO2) is leaving Europe as the sacrificial lambs on an altar of climate-change inconsequentiality.…

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The Catastrophe That Wasn’t: The Gulf Oil Spill in Perspective

By Paul Schwennesen -- August 25, 2010
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Rent Seeking with Global Warming: From Enron to California AB 32

By Tom Tanton -- August 24, 2010
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Carol Browner Knows the Drill (a surprising advocate of hydraulic fracturing of gas)

By Chris Tucker -- August 23, 2010
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(Book Review) James Hansen’s “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity” (alarmism on steroids)

By Jim Hollingsworth -- August 20, 2010
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A Skeptic of Climate Alarmism Speaks: Does Walter Cunningham Have More of a Case than His Critics Contend?

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 19, 2010
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Obama Gives Oil and Gas a Cold Shoulder (Ducking Houston on his recent visit)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 18, 2010
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Is GOP Opposition to Cap-and-Trade Self-Contradictory?

By -- August 17, 2010
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