Windspeak: Language used by those who profit financially, politically, or ideologically from wind technology that disguises, distorts, or reverses the meanings of words in order to promote the technology. Oxymorons, which combine incongruous or contradictory terms, abound in windspeak—viz, windpower, wind capacity, responsible windpower (double oxymoron), windfarms, windparks, wind jobs, wind reliability workshops, and wind as alternate energy. Generally any claim made for the technology in windspeak produces the virtually opposite effect in reality.

With the right story and no accountability, Madison Avenue can sell fantasy wholesale. Rock Hudson’s ad executive did just this 50 years ago in the charming send-up to our commercial culture, Lover Come Back, when he successfully marketed a non-existent product, VIP.

Nothing illustrates this idea better than the au courant fantasia about wind technology, where public relations legerdemain has deployed the power of windspeak to give wind a complete makeover, transforming a klutzy pretender into a seemingly benevolent superhero unbound by the laws of physics and even its own history.…

Public support for tapping America’s oil reserves has been strong over the past several years, but it received its toughest test with the Deepwater Horizon spill. The verdict is now in – and it’s drill, baby, drill!

A clear majority continued to support drilling in American waters even during the height of the spill, when oil was gushing uncontrollably and dying birds headlined network newscasts. Pollsters at Rasmussen report that, “since the oil rig explosion that caused the massive oil leak, support for offshore drilling has ranged from 56 percent to 64 percent.”

That’s not far below the 72 percent who supported it before the spill, nor much different than the support back in the summer of 2008 when pump prices topped $4 a gallon. Now that the leak has been stopped, the percentage in favor should start rising again.…

“As I have argued for years, we simply do not know the answer [to the sensitivity of climate to greenhouse gas forcing]. There is a wide margin of error in many of the ingredients that go into the [climate] models. For example, we do not know some of the radiative properties of the aerosols to a factor of 5. No matter how good your climate model is, you cannot compensate for that uncertainty. The range of uncertainty is broad enough to accommodate [Patrick] Michaels (well, maybe North) and [Jerry] Mahlman.”

– Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), September 17, 1999

“One has to fill in what goes on between 5 km and the surface. The standard way is through atmospheric models. I cannot make a better excuse.”

– Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), October 2, 1998

“We do not know much about modeling climate.

A new frontier for the world energy market is atop the world where thawing sea ice (a positive externality in this case) has opened up the possibility of major energy and other mineral production. The U.S., Canada, Russia, Denmark (via Greenland), and Norway have stakes in the Arctic domain:

Estimated potential resources are substantial (see below). The challenge is to turn potential resources in proven and probable reserves of both oil and gas.

New Developments: One Bad, One Good

Unforeseen events can have an enormous impact on the development of new markets and on public policy. Two such events occurred in April 2010.…