The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science. It’s all spelled out at WiseEnergy.org, which is a wealth of energy and environmental resources.

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every three weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and environmental matters. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

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Greed Energy Economics:

The Crazy World of Renewable Energy Targets

The Catch-22 of Energy Storage

The true cost of renewable energy is being masked by government subsidies and bailouts

Wind turbines don’t run on wind, they run on subsidies

New IRS Guidelines for PTC Wind Subsidy Waste More Taxpayer Dollars

House Republicans: End ‘harmful’ wind tax credit…

The words “environmental justice“ were coined years ago to help stop low-income living areas from being selected for unwanted property additions such as landfills and industrial plants. Now, this term is used by environmentalists to enlist minority groups such as African-Americans and Latinos to help them in their goals to stop fossil fuel use.

The claim is that minorities suffer more from health effects due to fossil-fuel use because they live closer to power plants or refineries. Thus we need to replace such facilities with renewable energies such as solar and wind. No thought is given to higher priced electricity from these energy sources and how this impacts minority communities. And concerns about sprawl are forgotten since this solution is really a call for energy sprawl.

Based on faulty science, environmental movements have called for banning the following with disproportionate effects on minorities:

1. …

“Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, take note. Look who is in the mainstream now! Julian Simon, step by step, is becoming the intellectual king of the sustainable development hill. First came Bjorn Lomborg. Then Paul Sabin. And now Bill Gates.”

Julian Simon, with his revolutionary theory of “the ultimate resource,” was far outside of the mainstream of sustainable development thought in his lifetime. But Simon’s marketing prowess and business acumen went to work, culminating in the most famous bet in the history of economics against Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, et al. on the future scarcity of mineral resources in a more populated world.

Such is the subject of a recent book by Yale history professor Paul Sabin, titled The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future, which was reviewed by Bill Gates (see below).…

“[Tom] Steyer has proven himself a master at working the system, first to amass a fossil-fuel fortune, and now to bask in the applause of the environmental left even as he feeds at the green energy subsidy trough…. Thus has he descended into a display of crass dishonesty shameless even by Beltway standards.”

– B. Zycher, “He’s Explaining, and He’s Losing.” The Hill,  July 18, 2014.

It’s good to have Benjamin Zycher, Ph.D economist and longtime energy scholar, at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

He continues the intellectual tradition carried on, most recently, by Stephen Hayward and Kenneth Green. And this tradition goes back to when AEI led the fight against oil and gas price and allocation controls in the dark 1970s. Twenty-five studies in their National Energy Project (1974–76) and Studies in Energy Policy (1976–85) helped make up for Resources for the Future taking a Malthusian left turn.…