“Statements from Physicians for Human Rights and from Human Rights First are long overdue. Despite the enormity of its victims’ suffering, the Wind Scam is off limits for most of those who have become famous for speaking out for social justice and human rights.”

“Dismissing or denying Big Wind’s serious health impacts is akin to presenting tobacco as harmless because we profit from it or enjoy smoking. Hardwired into every environmental impact statement should be a Surgeon General’s Warning: Industrial wind turbines present a significant human health hazard to those residing within 1.25 miles or more!”

[This post completes a three-part series: Part I: The General Problem and Part II: Nina Pierpont and the ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’]

How did we get to this point?

Energized by the Arab oil embargo of 1973, federal and state grants, energy tax credits, subsidies and mandates spurred a stampede toward an artificial market for wind-generated electricity.…

[Ed. Note: The author, an energy-management consultant and a classical liberal, is an active voice for free-market energy policy in the Southeastern US. He is also a board director of the Institute for Energy Research (IER) and its advocacy arm, the American Energy Alliance.

The December 2016 filing below was followed by an agreement between the Georgia Public Service Commission and Georgia Power Company that allowed GPC recovery of $1.55 billion in cost overruns regarding the 2,240 MW two-unit Vogtle nuclear project. (The plant’s original cost estimate of $14 billion is currently at $18 billion, a 28 percent overage.)

Mr. Clarkson has critically written on the Vogtle project since 2012, Politics and the Nation’s Next Nuclear Plant (Georgia Power’s boondoggle under construction). Subsequent posts by Clarkson have been written in 2013; 2014; 2015 (here, here, here, and here); and 2016 (here and here).…

“With a new political outlook in Washington, DC with climate and energy policy, Exxon Mobil should formally reject both cap-and-trade and a carbon tax.”

Rex Tillerson, whose confirmation hearing is scheduled for tomorrow, presided over a major public policy change while CEO of Exxon Mobil, reversing the prior policy of the principled realist Lee Raymond. Political forces, as well as a doomed attempt at appeasing its enemies (ending up in the state State Attorney General investigative war), led Exxon Mobil to reluctantly embrace a tax on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

My interpretation of Rex Tillerson et al.’s (failed) policy shift finds support for “it was just PR” rather than a fundamental belief in climate peril. As such, this shift is easily reversible by Exxon Mobil’s new CEO, Darren Woods.…

“Some radical environmentalists and religious activists oppose Mr. Pruitt because he does not embrace their exaggerated fears of human-induced global warming—fears that go well beyond the empirical evidence crucial to genuine science—or their antipathy to the development of the abundant, reliable, affordable energy indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty and the disease and premature death that invariably accompany it.”

January 5, 2017

Dear President-elect Donald J. Trump:

We write to you as evangelical and mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish scientists, economists, legal scholars, policy experts, and religious leaders in support of your nomination of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to the office of Administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA has the crucial task of writing and enforcing regulations that apply statutes passed by Congress and signed by the President to protect the life and health of Americans.…