In the wake of the BP well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico and the attempted terrorist bombing of New York’s Times Square, the broadcast media have been full of the sackcloth and ashes crowd pronouncing once more the end of the hydrocarbon era and the vital need for the U.S. to “break our oil addiction” ASAP.

Their soundbites start with a half-truth and end with a fallacy.  We are told that “60 percent of U.S. energy supplies still come from oil and gas,” with the implication that (i) all of that is imported; and (ii) the pittance that we produce domestically all comes from offshore facilities.

 It is true that 60 percent (actually 62.5%) of our energy comes from oil and gas.  But the portion that comes from natural gas, about 24% of total U.S.…

Another breach in the badly aging Kyoto wall has been opened.

After the failure of the Copenhagen meeting, the Italian Senate passed a motion calling for a re-assessment of European Union climate policies as well as a review of the IPCC process. The motion, presented by Sen. Antonio D’Alì (chairman of the Environment Committee) and Sen. Guido Possa (chairman of the Education Committee) as well as many other Senators, is a powerful sign of wide and growing dissent in many EU member states.

The EU is the largest economy to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, under which it is committed to cut its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 8% below 1990 levels in 2008-12. The EU has subsequently adopted a package of directives, the so-called “20-20-20,” that mandates a 20% reduction of GHG emissions below 1990 levels by 2020 and that 20% of total energy consumption will be provided by renewable sources, with a non-mandatory target of a 20% increase in energy efficiency.…

[Editor note: Bryce’s Power Hungry, released today, is his second book on energy after Gusher of Lies and fourth book overall.]

In his brand new book Power Hungry, energy journalist and Austin apiarist Robert Bryce marshals many numbers to plainly show how modern culture exacts power from energy to save time, increase wealth, and raise standards of living. Bryce also dispenses common sense to citizens and policy makers for an improved environment, a more productive economy, and a more enlightened civil society.

Inspired by enegy writings of Rockefeller University’s Jesse Ausubel, and the University of Manitoba’s prolific Vaclav Smil, he makes the case for continuing down the path of de-carbonizing our machine fuels—a process begun two hundred years ago when we turned from wood to fossil fuels and huge reservoirs of impounded water.…

Editor’s note: As the United States commemorates the 40^th anniversary of Earth Day we can expect to hear various commentators bemoan the growth in population, consumption, and carbon emissions driven by fossil-fueled technologies. We will be told that this is unsustainable, that we are running out of resources, that prices are inevitably headed up, and, worse, that such consumption reduces both environmental and human well-being. In this worldview, industrialization and economic development are the inventions of the Devil; de-industrialization and de-development will be our savior.

In this series of posts, Indur M. Goklany will compare the above Neo-Malthusian view of industrialization, economic growth, and technological change against empirical data on human well-being from the age of industrialization. First, he will revisit the bet made in 1980 by Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich on the direction of commodity prices, and examine long-term trends in the prices and affordability of various commodities, specifically, metals and food, going back to at least 1900.…