“The CO₂ helps unlock and recover crude oil from mature oil fields and residual oil zones. We use a good portion of this CO₂ in our own EOR projects….” (Kinder-Morgan)

“Many climate activists will have nothing to do with CCS because of its prominent/dominant role in enhanced oil recovery. But here is the Carbon Capture Coalition, with a green eye shade, promoting the very technology to increase American Energy Dominance.” (below)

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a new realm of rent-seeking in the all-things-climate debate. The Carbon Capture Coalition (a revamp of the National Enhanced Oil Recovery Initiative) describes itself as “a nonpartisan coalition supporting the deployment and adoption of carbon capture technology … to foster domestic energy production, support jobs and reduce emissions, all at the same time.”…

“Do you operate the ‘Institute of Energy Research’ out of your living room? What exactly entitles you to the evidently self-applied label of ‘energy expert’? … You appear to be a deputy adjunt miller, lacking both discernible qualifications in the real world and the ability to tell a good argument from a bad one.” (Holdren to Bradley, September 17, 2003)

Some 16 years ago, I put my book writing on hold to critically review the long written record of John P. Holdren, then (and now) a Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard University. (He was President Obama’s science adviser between Harvard appointments, from 2009 until 2017.)

The result, “The Heated Energy Debate: Assessing John Holdren’s Attack on Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist,” was published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in mid-2003.…

… under the Green New Deal, they don’t like clean, beautiful natural gas. They don’t like anything. They don’t know what they like. They sort of like wind, even though it kills all the birds. You want to see a bird cemetery? Go under a windmill sometime….

You know, in California, you go to jail for five years if you kill a bald eagle. If you go under a windmill, you see them all over the place.

– Donald Trump, “Remarks on Promoting Energy Infrastructure and Economic Growth,” Hackberry, Louisiana, May 14, 2019

Back in 1997, I published a long Policy Analysis for the Cato Institute, “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green’.” A section of that study, “The ‘Avian Mortality’ Problem,” addressed what President Trump recently said (above) 22 years later.…

In graphs and numbers, this article provides an overview of energy generation in the U.S., particularly electricity, during the last two decades. The data are extracted from the annual reports of the Department of Energy. For convenience, the various units used in the DOE tables are converted here to just one unit, the watt (W) with its billion multiple, the gigawatt (GW). Assigning the same unit for both generation and consumption enables straight-forward comparisons among efficiencies, capacity factors and the like.*

“Given the current productivity of wind and solar (W/S) employment, the presently available total work-force will be insufficient to manufacture, operate, maintain, tear down, dispose of, and erect all those millions of W&S plants that would be needed anew every 20 years.”

The Department of Energy (DOE) lists six energy sources as renewable: Wind, Solar, Hydro, Wood, Waste, and Geothermal.…