Recommended Post

Marlo Lewis: July 24, 2009: Is the Climate Science Debate Over? No, It’s Just Getting Very, Very Interesting (with welcome news for mankind)

Most Read Posts 

Climate Impacts of Waxman-Markey (the IPCC-based arithmetic of no gain) 10,978 Views (Chip Knappenberger)

Joseph Romm and Enron: For the Record 3,079 Views (Rob Bradley)

Smart Grid, Dumb Economics 2,361 Views (Jerry Taylor)

Climate Impacts of Waxman-Markey (Part II)—Global Sign-Up 2,165 Views (Chip Knappenberger)

Is the Climate Science Debate Over? No, It’s Just Getting Very, Very Interesting (with welcome news for mankind) 1,780 Views (Marlo Lewis)

Climate Alarmism Bullying: L’affaire Schmidt (new) … L’affaire Wigley (old) 1,701 Views (Rob Bradley)

The New MIT Climate Study: A Real World Inversion? 1,496 Views (Chip Knappenberger)

CO₂ Regulation under the Clean Air Act: Economic Train Wreck, Constitutional Crisis, Legislative Thuggery 1,296 Views (Marlo Lewis)

Most Active Posts

Is the Climate Science Debate Over?…

MasterResource, the world’s premier free-market energy blog, began the day after Christmas and is seven months old. Views of 50,000 in our first quarter have been followed by 100,000 in the second quarter. Viewership near one thousand per day is not bad for a scholarly start-up–and much growth potential remains.

Our Model

We are a group blog on the very important and wide topic of energy, including climate change, which is all about energy. Our bloggers come from a variety of institutions, nonprofit and for-profit. We have backgrounds in political economy, economics, environmental studies, philosophy, and engineering. We are thinker-doers who are open-minded and part of a challenge culture. No smartest-guys-in-the-room problem here.

In the increasingly crowded blogosphere, there will be a flight to quality to group blogs that have a clear theme.…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of Waterkeeper Alliance, posits in the Financial Times (July 19) that converting our fleet of coal-fired power plants to natural gas could be accomplished “practically overnight” and will have the effect of “jump-starting our economy….without the expense of building new power plants.” Thus did Kennedy express his new-found love of natural gas: It’s our “bridge fuel to the ‘new’ energy economy.” (Where have we heard that before–wasn’t that Enron’s tag line decade or two ago?)

Yet Kennedy’s proposal ignores the extremely high cost of fuel conversion (upwards of $100 million for a medium-size coal plant) and the added fuel cost to burn gas. He seriously mischaracterizes how an electricity market operates. And Joe Romm (Climate Progress) had added to the confusion by calling Kennedy’s proposal a “game changer.”…

“The current debate has proven one thing very clearly. The U.S. climate debate is not about saving the climate. It is about regulation for its own sake in the name of “saving the climate.” This fact should give pause to everyone who really cares about human welfare. Cap-and-trade is at odds with the economic wealth needed to adapt to a future that cannot be centrally planned by politicos.”

– “Cap-and-Trade and the Temple of Enron,” MasterResource

Saturday’s New York Times headline (print edition) read: “House Backs Bill, 219-212, to Curb Global Warming.” But if the 219 House members who voted for the American Clean Energy and Security Act (HR 2454, aka the Waxman-Markey climate bill) thought they were casting a vote to “curb global warming,” they were sadly mistaken.

As I have shown, the climate impact of U.S.…