“(Disclosure: My wife works for a private equity firm that invests in clean energy companies, and they have projects in Texas. But my interest in climate change and energy dates back 30 years, and like most spouses, my wife will tell you she has little influence over my opinions.)” – Tomlinson (below)

It is a start—but only a start. In a recent lobbyist-like editorial for the Houston Chronicle, the climate-religionist, bully-like, cut-the-beef Chris Tomlinson confessed to a conflict-of-interest. But the conflict is more than being married to a person that “works for a private equity firm that invests in clean energy companies”; his wife is a multi-millionaire rainmaker in wind and solar–the very two energies that Chris champions so completely and extensively.

His term “clean energy companies,” moreover, euphemizes the deep nature of wind and solar: government-enabled, cost-inflating, dilute, intermittent energies.…

“Forcibly moving the market via equipment costs is a typical DOE strategy. And then they say, ‘let the market decide’.”

On January 30, 2023, National Public Radio (NPR)  published an episode, How Worried Should You Be About Your Gas Stove?  On February 4, NPR released a follow up: Gas stove makers have a pollution solution. They’re just not using it. Listen to both audio clips.

NPR’s advocates are part of a choir trying to justify ending natural gas combustion, starting with gas stoves. They are just as purposefully misleading as the rest of the choir.

Policy Concern

The concern should not be about gas stove usage but the public policy of The Biden Administrative State to wean consumers off the direct use of natural gas and propane and on to electric appliances, ASAP. …

Ed. Note: With the failing climate narrative, it’s time to play offense in energy/environmental debates. Chris Wright of Denver-based Liberty Energy Inc., previously profiled at MasterResource, drawing upon his company’s 99-page 2022 sustainability report, “Bettering Human Lives,” offers a compelling argument. [1]

“Let’s all check our desires to be fashionable or hip when we talk about energy. Energy is so critical to human well-being that we must speak honestly, candidly, and frequently to combat the increasingly damaging plague of energy ignorance that has taken over our country and much of the western world.”

Chris Wright is a member of the New School of moral-high-ground fossil-fuel executives. So is Adam Anderson, CEO of Innovex Downhole Solutions, who exposed North Face/VF Corporation’s anti-petroleum stance. Another notable is Vivek Ramaswamy, Executive Chairman, Strive Asset Management, who exhorts more oil and gas production from the companies he invests in “to both create significant shareholder value and contribute to human flourishing.”…

Ed. Note: The California Independent System Operator (CAISO) has issued statewide “flex alerts” (blackout alerts) for six days running. Today’s post describes the in-place demand reduction program. Part II tomorrow will update the current situation and the familiar reasons why: dilute, intermittent energies being forced on the grid by state and federal policy wounding the reliables generated from mineral energies.

A major theme of political economy is: one government intervention or program leads to another and yet another. In “green electricity” California, supply-side distortions have required demand-side management (DSM) within the central planning exercise of Integrated Resource Planning. That began in the 1980s; today, there is centralized wholesale power grid planning. And supply side mismanagement means demand-side programs and exhortation to use less energy in the peak-demand hours.

It is back to Amory Lovins’s soft energy path within his “whole-systems planning,” whereby a “negawatt” (usage forgone) is as important as a kilowatt (see the conclusion below).…