Fighting AGW Religion in North Carolina (sea-level-rise debate gets political)

By -- June 12, 2012 12 Comments

What’s been happening recently in North Carolina (NC) is a microcosm of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) story: politics versus science, ad-hominems versus journalism, evangelists versus pragmatists, etc.

The contentiousness is over one of the main AGW battlefields: sea-level rise (SLR). North Carolina happens to have a large amount of coastline and has become the U.S. epicenter for this issue.

Background

The brief version is that this began several years ago when a state agency, the Coastal Resources Commission (CRC), selected a 20± member “science panel” to do a scientific assessment of the NC SLR situation through 2100. This could have been a very useful project if there had been balance in the personnel selections, and the panel’s assessment adhered to scientific standards. Regrettably, neither happened and the project soon jumped the rails, landing in the political agenda ditch.…

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Wind Wipe Out? (Worst feared at AWEA convention)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- June 6, 2012 8 Comments

No Jay Leno this year at the annual confab of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). Instead of celebration and jokes (all at the expense of taxpayers and ratepayers), there is doom and gloom.

Bill Opalka reports at EnergyBiz:

Failure to extend the production tax credit would devastate the domestic wind energy supply chain and virtually wipe out wind power development next year, officials stressed during the June 4 opening of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) annual conference in Atlanta.

But the public is catching on to the industrial wind ruse.  The lead comment (7:48 AM) on Opalka’s article says much about how fatigue has set in to this ancient, postmodernistic energy source:

Will this desire to feed at the public trough never end? The mere fact that wind needs the PTCs to survive tells us very loudly and clearly it is not a competitive power technology at this time.

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EPA's Flawed Science: From Pretense of Knowledge to Fatal Conceit

By Kathleen Hartnett White -- June 5, 2012 11 Comments

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions … adaptation to the unknown can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.”

F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 76

Whenever the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is confronted with evidence that its proposed regulations will kill jobs, risk blackouts, or otherwise harm economic growth, it typically seeks refuge in its own estimates of the amazing public health benefits the proposal will have.…

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Bootleggers, Baptists, and Utility MACT

By -- May 29, 2012 2 Comments

The “Bootleggers and Baptists” theory of regulation, coined by Bruce Yandle in 1983 in Regulation magazine, uniquely explains what otherwise would be considered bizarre coalitions between moral crusaders and morally indifferent businesses.

In a later telling, Yandle explained how the theory

draws on colorful tales of states’ efforts to regulate alcoholic beverages by banning Sunday sales at legal outlets. Baptists fervently endorsed such actions on moral ground. Bootleggers tolerated the actions gleefully because their effect was to limit competition.

One such unholy alliance has emerged between environmentalists and some utilities in the context of the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent Utility Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (Utility MACT) rule.

Those unfamiliar with the Bootleggers and Baptists theory may conclude that those compliant energy companies are enlightened at long last. But those who know the theory will take a more cynical view.…

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Real World Economics (key to understanding real-world energy)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 18, 2012 No Comments Continue Reading

Star States on the Road to U.S. Hydrocarbon Plenty

By Julia Bell -- May 15, 2012 5 Comments Continue Reading

Alarmism or Not? Joe Romm and the 'Crying Wolf' Dilemma

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 1, 2012 23 Comments Continue Reading

Obama's Quiet Executive Order: Reaffirming and Expanding Federal Powers

By Dave Harbour -- April 18, 2012 8 Comments Continue Reading

Diminished Climate Alarmism: Lessons from L'Affair Heartland

By Robert Murphy -- March 23, 2012 35 Comments Continue Reading

Natural Gas Prices Spur Truckmaker Interest (Market, not political, development)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- March 8, 2012 8 Comments Continue Reading