Thirty years after President Carter declared that our energy crisis was the “moral equivalent of war,” forever known as “meow,” we are faced with another federal potentate who is sure that he knows what is best for us. At a Smart Grid conference in Washington, D.C., Energy Secretary Stephen Chu opined that “The American public … just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act.”
Just as President Carter declared that our country’s failure to conserve natural gas and oil was a symptom of a “malaise,” not heaven forefend, the low prices for fuels sold at (federally) regulated prices, so does the current Energy Secretary believe that our citizenry is incapable of making rational decisions about energy use.
Why would the smartest guy in the room (read: central planner) say such a thing–a mistake his press office now says?…
Continue Reading“On our current emissions path, we’re going to … warm more than 4°C by century’s end.”
– Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, August 11, 2009
“I will be happy to bet anyone that the 2010s will be the hottest decade in the temperature record, more than 0.15°C hotter than the hottest decade so far using the NASA GISS dataset. Any takers? Andy [Revkin]?”
Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, September 22, 2009
In a fit of rage, uber-alarmist Joe Romm of ClimateProgress has recently offered a temperature warming bet that he can win even if more than 85% of all climate models are shown to overpredict future warming.
Has Joe seen the light and become a “lukewarmer”—that is, someone who thinks that the human CO2 emissions will result in only a modest rise in global temperature, somewhere at or below the bottom end of the IPCC range of projections?…
Continue Reading[Yesterday’s post discussed how FERC failed to implement the siting authority granted in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and examined a case study about why it failed. Part II looks at Obama’s “green power” superhighway, the recent work by regional transmission planning organizations to bring renewable energy to market, and the extremely high costs to do so.]
Public policy has long supported the ability to construct new transmission lines that relieve congestion and reduce the cost of energy to consumers. However, it is another question entirely to construct a new “green” coast-to-coast transmission corridor given the mess our transmission system is in today and its prohibitive cost. Critics have complaint that it is throwing good (transmission) money at bad (renewable) generation money.
Slowly, regional system operators are resolving transmission bottlenecks and improving the smooth flow of energy in their service territories.…
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