A Free-Market Energy Blog

Dear Tom Friedman: Don’t Want You to Die Off … Just Get Well!

By Donald Hertzmark -- November 21, 2009

In the New York Times editorial page’s latest excursion into shrill climate alarmism, foreign affairs correspondent Thomas Friedman accuses those opposing the current cap-and-tax bill as wanting a few people, say 2.5 billion to die off.  And us bad guys are just grasping at straws. “. . . you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims,” he says. “One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.”

Gosh, Tom, I suppose that the pace of global warming has accelerated in the last decade, and hurricanes are getting more frequent and stronger too. And those emails from the alarmist in-crowd that the climate world (and general public!) are reading about right now–those are the good guys, the real disinterested scholars at work.…

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The Decline of Climate Alarmism (Will the Left rethink an increasingly futile crusade?)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- November 20, 2009

My ‘Left’ friends are mad at me now that the climate debate/ discussion has shifted, at least temporarily, from Save the World to Why Did We Fail? Here is what a former Enron executive (his name will remain confidential) emailed me a few days ago:

Rob- shame on you. The [Breakthrough Institute] article [Apocalypse Fatigue: Losing the Public on Climate Change] names only 3 reasons why the U.S. will not address climate mitigation: far off threat, greed, and telling them what they don’t want to hear. It ignores the real reason: the constant effort from people like yourself to undermine the case for action with its ancillary affect of dividing the country and paralyzing the system.

Then the sarcasm comes in:

I am not being facetious: you should pat yourself on that back for helping create an atmosphere that will prevent any meaningful action on the false threat of climate change from happening in this country.

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High Capital Costs Plague Solar (RPS mandates, cost dilution via energy mixing required) Part III

By Robert Peltier -- November 19, 2009

Solar power has one major advantage over its more ubiquitous cousin wind power: electricity that is  generated during peak demand hours (hot, sunny, air conditioned afternoons). Such makes solar attractive to utilities that value such capacity for peak shaving, cost aside.

The problem of wind is shown by this example. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) leads the nation with more than 8,000 MW of installed wind capacity, yet their resource planning–tasked with keeping the lights on–“counts 8.7 percent of wind nameplate capacity as dependable capacity at peak.”

The limited usefulness of wind and solar is reflected by their low system capacity factors. For example, the capacity factor of a typical utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) or concentrating solar project (CSP) is still limited to about 25% compared to the average for U.S.

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Origins of the Gasoline Tax (Part II of “Political Capitalism: Understanding the Beast that Broke the Cage”)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- November 18, 2009
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Climate Change – What Do Economists Really Think?

By Jerry Taylor -- November 17, 2009
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Wind Integration: Incremental Emissions from Back-Up Generation Cycling (Part II)

By Kent Hawkins -- November 16, 2009
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“Industrial Wind Power in Maine’s Mountains is Bad Policy” (Testimony of Citizens Task Force on Wind Power)

By Brad Blake -- November 14, 2009
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Wind Integration: Incremental Emissions from Back-Up Generation Cycling (Part I: A Framework and Calculator)

By Kent Hawkins -- November 13, 2009
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Houston Chronicle: Former Environmental Writer Documents Origins of Left/Alarmist Bias at the Paper

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- November 12, 2009
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The Peak Oil Secret is Revealed!

By -- November 11, 2009
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