“The Icebreaker Windpower project can be seen as entirely moot: there will be no meaningful benefit to Ohio and its citizens. The chimera of jobs and a boosted economy will never become material; the obvious loss to bird and bat life scarcely needs a comment.”

The heat is on for supporters of the six-turbine LEEDCo Icebreaker Windpower project offshore of Cleveland.

A show of “yeas” at the November 8^th public meeting of the Ohio Power Siting Board (OPSB) at Cleveland City Hall failed to make a dent in the logical and passionate opposition. A few dozen supporters at a public meeting is not material for a facility that is uneconomical and environmentally invasive–and unneeded except for a poster child of what was Obama energy policy.

It is surprising that the OPSB has not closed the file on the now called “Icebreaker Windpower.”…

“If we can’t even use seismic to ‘see’ the vast majority of our underground prospects and resources, we cannot possibly estimate what is actually there. The one thing we can say is: Our current estimates of U.S. oil and gas resources are wrong, and are almost certainly much too low.”

“Producing ANWR’s oil riches represents hundreds of billions in state and federal royalties and corporate income taxes, over the life of the fields, plus billions more in lease sale revenues, plus thousands of direct and indirect jobs, in addition to numerous jobs created when all this money is reinvested in the USA.”

Paul Driessen is a indefatigable intellectual warrior for energy and climate realism. Propelled by a distain for crony  environmentalism that promotes global poverty, he has produced weekly opinion-page editorials and written a full-scale book challenging climate alarmism and unmasking energy fantasies.…

“Climate change is a major focus of many large foundations. Just about any approach to climate change you can think of is getting funding, and organizations at all levels — local, regional, national, global — are receiving support.”

– “Climate Change – Funders.” Inside Philanthropy. (Website Visit: October 13, 2017)

Right after the election of Donald Trump last November, I posted a provocative piece, 1) Eliminate Obamacare 2) Challenge Private Foundations to Divert all Global Warming Spending to Health Insurance for the Vulnerable. With a climate reset coming, and the imperative to repeal or shrink Obamacare, I saw an opportunity to couple the issue for a win-win.

My short post read:

The headline above is a public policy idea for the Trump Administration and for the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate.

“Forced use of higher-cost U.S.-flag vessels has benefitted domestic water carrier firms, shipbuilding companies, and associated labor at the expense of consumers. This advantage, however, has been diluted because inflated shipping costs has reduced the attractiveness of barge and tanker transport compared to other alternatives.”

The Puerto Rico recovery effort has brought attention to an arcane special-interest cabotage regulation that delayed shipments to the imperiled island–and required a waiver from President Trump: Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, [(Public Law 261, 41 Stat. 988 (1920)], commonly known as the Jones Act.

Previous posts at MasterResource (here and here) examined the history of oil-export regulation by the federal government; this post surveys the history of water-vessel restrictions from Washington, D.C. directly or indirectly impacting oceanic commerce.…