“With climate change politics a given, Yergin surveys history with a dose of political economy to see two energy worlds: conventional, consumer-chosen, taxpayer-neutral, dense, reliable minerals vs. government-dependent, politically powerful, dilute, intermittent wind and solar, as well as battery-powered electric vehicles.”

Daniel Yergin’s tomes are fun reading and great cliff notes to the sweep of energy history. With many hundreds of energy books on my shelf, I find myself pulling down The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (1990), The Commanding Heights (1998), and The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (2011). I also peruse his edited/coauthored Energy Future (1979) to note Yergin’s incorrect embrace of the soft energy path when it was ‘the thing.’

His latest is The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (Penguin Press, 2020).…

There are many thousands of academics and others that do not like capitalism, industrialization, consumerism, and mineral energies. The same “consensus” thought that Peak Oil had arrived, time and again. Malthusianism is and has always been “consensus science.”

An ongoing exercise in groupthink is to believe the climate is in crisis because a scientific/political elite says so. Never mind that the Malthusians/ neo-Malthusians have been wrong with their ‘garbage-in, garbage-out’ models ever since the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) “limits to growth” model in 1972.

Enter Mark Mathis of the Clear Energy Alliance, a student of all things energy and climate and a distinguished communicator (see Appendix). Last month at an industry event (Marcellus Utica Midstream Conference, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Mathis stated in “Breaking Through the Regulatory Wall:”

For a scientist, for a climatologist to say, “we know that we’re the cause,” okay, “and the consequences are extreme” — well, we’ve got these giant natural factors, you know, sunspot activity, oceans, cloud formations, these are all extraordinarily complex things, okay?

The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy and environmental policies. Our premise is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science (please consult WiseEnergy.org for more information).

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 the environment. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

Some of the more important articles in this issue are:
Everything You Hear About Billion-Dollar Disasters Is Wrong
Wind turbines don’t lead to a windfall
Perpetual Infants: $100 Billion in Subsidies and US Wind & Solar Want More
NY State blows smoke to hide wind costs
California Subsidizes Natural Gas Plants to Prevent Widespread Blackouts
The Electric Car Fantasy
Germany stipulates turbine setbacks to be 3300± feet
Conventional Wind Energy – A Design Deadly for Birds
Inherit The Wind
PUC’s Former Lawyer Says Approval Of Hawaii Wind Project Violated Law
First-of-a-kind U.S.…

At 41, [James Rogers] was named CEO of PSI Energy Inc., a small, financially troubled Indiana utility. Breaking ranks with others in the electric-power industry, he supported legislation putting caps on sulfur-dioxide emissions. “Some of my guys thought I was drinking the environmental Kool-Aid,” he said later. “But I said, ‘Let’s shape this, let’s make some money.’”

– James Hagerty, “Jim Rogers, Head of a Coal-Burning Utility, Crusaded Against Global Warming.” Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2018.

“I made money on sulfur [dioxide], and I’ll make money on carbon [dioxide].”

– James Rogers. Quoted in Eric Pooley, “The Smooth-Talking King of Coal–and Climate Change.” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 3, 2010.

James Eugene “Jim” Rogers Jr. (1947–2018) was a notable political capitalist (rent seeker) of the late 20th/early 21st century electricity market.…