A Free-Market Energy Blog

Industrial Wind Plants: Bad Economics, Bad Ecology

By Jon Boone -- October 24, 2009

Editor Note: Jon Boone, a lifelong environmentalist, co-founded the North American Bluebird Society and has consulted for the Roger Tory Peterson Institute in New York. He has been a formal intervenor in two Maryland Public Service Commission hearings and produced and directed the documentary, Life Under a Windplant.

Industrial wind technology is a meretricious commodity, attractive in a superficial way but without real value—seemingly plausible, even significant but actually false and nugatory.

Those who would profit from it either economically or ideologically are engaged in wholesale deception. For in contrast to their alluring but empty promises of closed coal plants and reduced carbon emissions is this reality: Wind energy is impotent while its environmental footprint is massive and malignant.

A wind project with a rated capacity of 100 MW, for example, with 40 skyscraper-sized turbines, would likely produce an annual average of only 27 MW, an imperceptible fraction of energy for most grid systems.…

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Climate Change: The Resilience Option (far better than climate stasis)

By Kenneth P. Green -- October 23, 2009
Climate Change: The Resilience Option
Kenneth P. Green
What Is Better, Climate Resilience or Climate Stasis?
In general, the mainstream response to the issue of climate change has been reactive, pessimistic, authoritarian, and resistant to change. Those alarmed about a changing climate would stand athwart the stream of climate history and cry “stop, enough!” Rather than working to cease human influence on climate, they want to find a way to make the climate stand still. This focus on creating climate stasis has led to policy proposals that would have been laughed at or dismissed as wacky conspiracy theories in the 1980s. But mainstream anti-climate-change activists are proposing nothing less than the establishment of global weather control through energy rationing, regulations, and taxes, all managed by a global bureaucracy with a goal of leading humanity into a future that will become smaller, more costly, and less dynamic over time.
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Okay, Joe Romm: How about a Wager on $65 Oil? (‘peak-oil’ bull or closet bear?)

By -- October 21, 2009

[After publication of my New York Times Op-ed on peak oil, Joseph Romm posted a response—and a challenge—on his website, and later expanded it on The Huffington Post. Below is Michael Lynch’s response.]

Thank you very much for your invitation to a wager on the price of oil, Joe, which I take to be serious, even though you made no effort to convey the wager to me personally. (If you were simply making a “‘pr” effort, feel free to withdraw it.) I would warn you that for most of my career I have been referred to as a ‘heretic’ or ‘contrarian’ and have repeatedly outperformed other forecasters by explaining (in a number of academic publications) why the forecasting of oil price and supply has been so deficient. That you appear to have been more prescient than me no doubt gives you confidence.…

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

By Robert Peltier -- October 20, 2009
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Refuting the Case for a CO2 Tax: William Nordhaus’s “DICE Model” Reconsidered

By Robert Murphy -- October 19, 2009
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Setting The Economist Straight on Developing Countries and (Anthropogenic) Climate Change

By Indur Goklany -- October 17, 2009
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Gas From Shale Deposits: A Worldwide Game-Changer? (Part II)

By Donald Hertzmark -- October 16, 2009
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Sen. Lindsey Graham’s Me-Too Kyotoism (will he snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?)

By -- October 15, 2009
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The Global Shale Gas Revolution (Dear Renewables: Meet the New Competition for Power Generation)

By Donald Hertzmark -- October 14, 2009
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Windpower Is Not an Infant Industry!

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 13, 2009
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