“The pledges to reach net zero emissions made by many countries, including China and India, should have very strong implications for coal – but these are not yet visible in our near-term forecast, reflecting the major gap between ambitions and action.” (International Energy Agency, below)
The father of energy economics made it official back in 1865. “Coal, in truth, stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities,” wrote William Stanley Jevons:
It is the material energy of the country—the universal aid—the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times.
Another writer of the day added:
… Continue ReadingCoal is everything to us. Without coal, our factories will become idle, our foundries and workshops be still as the grave; the locomotive will rust in the shed, and the rail be buried in the weeds.
With the remake of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels (2014) on deck (mid-April release scheduled), Fossil Future … could not come at a better time given the energy crises from anti-fossil fuel policies leaving consumers at the mercy of the momentary output of the wind and sun.
History might well record Alex Epstein as the First Philosopher of Energy. How to think correctly amid the politicization of all-things-climate is a quest that only one person has really tried to master. And it starts not with deep ecology notions but on the premise of human betterment, now and over time.
With the remake of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels (2014) on deck (mid-April release scheduled), Fossil Future will join Steven Koonin’s Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (2021) as a best seller on the reality of energy and climate.…
Continue Reading“Let’s be clear: the frequent comparison of the fossil fuel and tobacco industries is nonsense. Fossil fuels are a valuable energy source that has done yeomen service for humankind.” – James Hansen, June 1, 2021
Part of the retreat of the climate alarmists/forced energy transformationists is conceding that carbon-based mineral energies have been a key, wondrous factor in human progress. BUT, it is contended, the party cannot go on….
James Hansen knows energy well enough to know what many climate alarmists/forced energy transformationists do not: it is dense mineral energy or bust. And thus he is all-in with uranium/nuclear power. Wind and solar, being dilute and intermittent, are not up for the job, he has concluded.
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“Let’s be clear,” James Hansen writes in “Fighting the Battles, Winning the War.”…
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