Electricity for the Poor – What Copenhagen Really Needs to Confront
By Donald Hertzmark -- December 9, 2009When you fly overnight from Johannesburg to Europe the lights become thin just north of Lusaka, Zambia, a few more in Zambia’s Copper Belt and then nothing (and I mean nothing) until the North African coastline. For most of this 11-12 hour flight there are no artificial lights below. From the Sahara on south, but excluding South Africa, a region that is home to more than 400 million people consumes less electricity than New York City.
The World At Night (courtesy of Bert Christensen. Click to enlarge.)
- And yet this area includes major oil producers:
Nigeria produces 2.1 million b/d oil and consumes 19 billion kWh/y
Angola produces 2.0 million b/d oil and consumes 3.2 billion kWh/y
Equatorial Guinea produces 0.36 million b/d and consumes 26 million kWh/y
Other sub-Saharan Africa oil producers supply more than 1 million b/d to world markets.
Climategate Did Not Begin With Climate (Remembering Julian Simon and the storied intolerance of neo-Malthusians)
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 8, 2009A powerful argument against climate alarmism is the failed worldview of modern neo-Malthusianism, which has promoted fear after fear with an intolerant, smartest-guys-in-the-room mentality. Remember the “population bomb” where many millions would die in food riots? Well, obesity turned out to be the real problem.
Remember the Club of Rome’s resource scare? In 1972, 57 predictions of exhaustion were made regarding 19 different minerals. All either have been falsified or will be.
Remember the global-cooling scare promoted by, among others, the Obama administration’s science czar, John Holdren? (Yes, global cooling was a big deal, although it was not a “consensus.”)
And all of the above doom merchants were uber-confident and still are loath to admit they were ever wrong. Holdren, for example, is sticking to his prediction that as many as one billion people could die by 2020 from (man-made) climate change.…
Continue ReadingEthanol: Unintended Consequences
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 7, 2009“[Government] intervention that impinges on complex market forces can produce both unpredicted and unpredictable results.”
– Robert Bradley, Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience (vol. 2), p. 1791.
Of all the environmental boondoggles of recent years, the biggest must be corn ethanol. As MasterResource’s Ken Green wrote in an article summarizing ethanol’s impact on the environment:
Contrary to popular belief, ethanol fuel will do little or nothing to increase our energy security or stabilize fuel prices. Instead, it will increase greenhouse gas emissions, local air pollutant emissions, fresh water scarcity, water pollution (both riparian and oceanic), land and ecosystem consumption, and food prices.
In a recent speech, Green elaborated, pointing out
… Continue Readingthe absolute fiasco of corn ethanol, which has caused increases in air pollution, water pollution, freshwater consumption, coastal pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and food prices.