“… this was one of the hottest and most promising job sectors in the country at the end of 2024. Now, clean energy job growth is at serious risk – and with it, our overall economy.” (-Bob Keefe, below)

“Solar construction firm Blue Ridge Power issues mass worker layoff in North Carolina,” read the article in pv magazine. “The utility-scale solar engineering, procurement and construction firm filed a WARN act with the state, cutting over 500 jobs.”

Much of the rooftop solar industry is in liquidation mode, and now the central station “utility scale” solar industry is in trouble. Expect more of the same in the next months as solar subsidies and local opposition grows (the environmental grassroots). The delayed end of the Investment Tax Credit (30 percent credit) and the Production Tax Credit (2.8 cents/kWh) will cause a rush to the exits before the credits expire at the end of 2027 (with credits at risk for projects not started by July 4, 2026).…

“… the doctrine of ‘social responsibility’ involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scarce resources to alternative uses.” (- Milton Friedman, 1970)

Lisa Sachs, director of the Columbia Center for Sustainable Investment, is all-in with climate alarmism and forced energy transformation. No debate allowed about fundamental premises, despite my best efforts to persuade her otherwise.

Today, she is tangled up in the subjectivity and contradictions of “socially responsible” investing. Business is the process of winning profits and avoiding losses, with distractions such as “socially responsible” minimized. Yes, ethical norms should be respected, as Milton Friedman clearly stated in his seminal essay, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.” But business is not government or a charity.…

The following memorandum within the vast bowels of Exxon Corporation from 1979 has led to several fallacies that the memo represented company policy and was definitive at the time.

False and false. This memo from certain employees never made it to a company position for cause. Global cooling was the bigger concern back then, and the above memo did not investigate the SO₂ offset, much less the benefits from CO₂ fertilization and incremental warming. Peak Oil and Peak Gas was the intellectual/practical concern of this era.

Background Posts

MasterResource has opined on this subject is a series of posts, summarized here.

• A rebuttal to an op-ed by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, “The Forgotten Oil Ads that Told Us Climate Change was Nothing.”
• A critical review of Inside Climate News’s “Exxon: The Road Not Taken” (here and here)
• A three-part rejoinder of Big Oil vs The World by the BBC (Episode I; Episode II; Episode III)
• A rejoinder to Shell Knew (here)
• ‘ExxonKnew’: More Correction (Sept.

“ENTRA1’s website is a cyber Potemkin village, all façade with no reality. The site has buttons bragging: ‘drawing on 45+ years of experience’ … ‘portfolio experience of ~6B$ in energy and infrastructure projects’, … ‘delivering on a ~30GW SMR project pipeline.’ Click on those boxed claims for further information and the result is literally nothing.”

When the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced this month that it had reached a mammoth deal — financial and timing details unspecified — to acquire 6,000 MW (6 GW) of purchased power from a wide array of NuScale small modular reactors to be owned by ENTRA1–it produced some head-scratching.

What the heck is ENTRA1? It’s not an easy question to answer, although online sleuthing provides some useful details. The name first surfaced in the fall of 2023, when NuScale announced a sketchy deal with an Ohio data center developer with ENTRA1 described as NuScale’s partner with exclusive rights to develop, manage, own and operate energy production plants powered by NuScale’s SMRs.…