Editor note: America the Beautiful is at her best in December when billions of tiny stringed light bulbs turn darkness into magnificent beauty and celebration. Holiday lighting is a great social offering—a positive externality in the jargon of economics—given by many to all. With the increasing sustainability of energy, beginning with the fossil-fuel family, celebrate with the lights on!

Forget the holiday-lighting humbug from the deep ecologists who say:

I’ve reached the point of feeling like a Scrooge; feeling outrage over the tons of C02 going into the atmosphere via neighbors’ 10,000 light displays rather than feeling ‘joyous’.”

And:

Actually, here comes the Scrooge bit.… But aside from light pollution, a substantial environmental footprint is created by what the Energy Saving Trust terms an ‘extravagant light display’, which translates into the generation of 400kg of extra CO₂….

Ed. note: This fortnightly Master Resource post excerpts energy and climate material from the Media Balance Newsletter, published every other week by physicist John Droz Jr., founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions. The complete MBN for this post can be found here.

Of special interest in this issue is Robert Bryce’s Senate testimony.

Greed Energy Economics & the Environment:

World’s largest offshore wind facility ‘unprofitable’, govt funded report confirms
Britons face record bill as wind farms perform poorly again
National Audubon Society sues county over wind turbine project: ‘A population sink’
Swiss wind project ordered to scale back to protect birds

Wind Energy:
Party’s Over: Unreliable Wind & Solar Ditched In Favor of Reliable Nuclear & Gas
Climate change, “wind droughts” and the implications for Wind energy
Long Island Power Authority sued about offshore wind project
Second lawsuit filed by opponents of proposed VA wind project
Interior Department approves 2nd large U.S.…

Politicized ends-justify-the-means “science” includes cutting corners, hiding data, splicing-and-dicing–and cancelling those with different theories and findings. All came to light in the Climategate saga.

Yesterday’s post examined the fire behind the smoke that many had noticed for years. Today’s post resurrects Fred Pearce’s “‘Climategate’ was PR disaster that could bring healthy reform of peer review,” which was published in The Guardian (UK) in February 2010.

From The Guardian

In a unique experiment, The Guardian published online the full manuscript of its major investigation into the climate science emails stolen from the University of East Anglia, which revealed apparent attempts to cover up flawed data; moves to prevent access to climate data; and to keep research from climate sceptics out of the scientific literature.

As well as including new information about the emails, we allowed web users to annotate the manuscript to help us in our aim of creating the definitive account of the controversy.…

“… solar’s production boom has left its recycling infrastructure in the dust…. The totality of these unforeseen costs could crush industry competitiveness.”

“A first step to forestalling disaster may be for solar panel producers to start lobbying for similar legislation in the United States immediately, instead of waiting for solar panels to start clogging landfills.”

“The same problem is looming for other renewable-energy technologies.”

In The Dark Side of Solar Power, (Harvard Business Review: June 2021), authors Atalay Atasu, Serasu Duran, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove bring the solar boom back down to earth. Quotations follow from the article (subtitles added):

• Solar’s pandemic-proof performance is due in large part to the Solar Investment Tax Credit, which defrays 26% of solar-related expenses for all residential and commercial customers (just down from 30% during 2006-2019).