The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy and environmental policies. Our premise is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science (please consult WiseEnergy.org for more information).

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every three weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and the environment. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

Some of the more important articles in this issue are:

Globally, $2.4 TRILLION per year required for renewables

The high cost of being a ‘Good Neighbor’ to Big Wind

Are Existing Coal-Fired Power Plants Less Expensive Than New Gas, Wind or Solar?…

“Imagining a low-carbon world, then, means reevaluating our conception of freedom itself.”

– Audrea Lim, “The Ideology of Fossil Fuels.” Dissent, Spring 2018.

Audrea Lim in a recent issue of Dissent (a quarterly magazine for Left Progressivism) penned an essay, “The Ideology of Fossil Fuels.” The journalist/editor at Verso Books offers a rather bizarre view of the energy world. She writes in part:

Why is it so much easier, as the saying goes, to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? …. The most straightforward answer to the question, perhaps, lies in the sticky substance that fuels capitalism as we know it, and is daily bringing us closer to the apocalypse of the [doomsday] preppers’ imagination: oil.

“The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use,” writes the postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty in a seminal essay collected in Energy Humanities.…

“… the biggest earthquake is the Donald Trump factor. If things play out the way they look like they will, he is going to get the nomination, and he is going to be utterly decimated in November…. He will not just be defeated, he will be slaughtered.”

– Jerry Taylor, February 23, 2016 [1]

“What we stand to lose [from the Paris withdrawal] is a seat at the table and trust in America’s ability to deal with big problems….  To see it undone for the purpose of satisfying craven nationalism is distressing…. The climate, national security, and economic implications of turning our backs on the world are hard to fathom, but they may run very deep.”

– Niskanen Center, May 31, 2017 (below)

The bizarre makeover of Jerry Taylor from trenchant foe of climate alarmism/forced energy transformation to Big Government bodyguard has been told elsewhere.…

“The spat in Bonn highlights what many opponents of the Paris Agreement believed: the global climate crusade is really about redistributing global wealth.”

“Expect European governments to announce revised carbon reduction targets, as their inability to reach their 2020 targets becomes clear. Kicking the ball down the road and focusing on the new goals makes it easier to avoid explaining why earlier targets were missed. Next year will likely usher in an era of environmental mea culpas from Europe.”

Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union, reported that the organization’s members’ carbon emissions increased last year by 1.8% compared to 2016.

The performance of the individual countries was mixed. Among the five countries accounting for 10% or more of total EU emissions, three were up significantly, one was essentially flat, and one was down materially.…