It is the middle of summer here in Southern India. The heat and wind are working together to give sharp spells of thunderstorms in the interiors, while coastal cities remain largely dry.Rain is good. All our cities are highly dependent on monsoon rains, and the pre-monsoon rains are more than welcome. However, not all things work well with rain.Thunderstorms cause regular power interruptions of at least 5 hours a day between 3 and 11 pm in my city, Bangalore. On one particular evening last week, … [Read more...]
Is Germany the First Developed Nation Headed Towards Energy Suicide?
Ever since Germany’s announcement that it will go coal-free by 2022, one question keeps popping up in my head: Will mighty Germany be the first developed economy to commit energy suicide?Earlier this year, Germany announced that it will close all of its 84 coal-fired power plants by 2038. Ronald Pofalla, chairman of the government commission that developed the plan, remarked “There won’t be any more coal-burning plants in Germany by 2038”.But are Germany’s aspirations practically achievable? In … [Read more...]
Wind and Solar Energy—Never Meant to Work?
What would you think if someone told you that one of the most important early champions of wind power touted it precisely because he thought it couldn't work for advanced, industrialized societies?"Aww, can't be true"?Well, it can be, and it is.In "The Question Concerning Technology" (1954), Martin Heidegger---one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers, argued that "modern technology ... puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and … [Read more...]
Does Fighting Global Warming Help or Hurt the Poor?
Want to "bring nothing but misery to poor people, especially in the developing world"? Simple: Just follow the advice of the international cabal of UN leaders and their organizations calling for drastic action to fight global warming. The harangue is familiar everywhere by now: Global warming will harm everybody, but it'll harm the poor most of all. Curbing it will help everybody, but it'll help the poor most of all. Is that true? Not according to Dr. Mikko Paunio, an expert on public health … [Read more...]
Dumping CCS Is the Right Decision
Every once in a while—well, a lot more often than I wish—I miss a big story related to climate change and climate policy. Week before last, on my birthday, I missed a really big one: the decision by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reverse a critical piece of Obama-era energy regulation. Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler—whom President Donald Trump nominated the following week to become permanent Administrator—announced December 6 that EPA would liberate … [Read more...]
Why Should America Expand its Nuclear Energy Sector?
I've long thought the primary obstacle to the great expansion of nuclear power's contribution to America's energy needs is excessive regulation imposing safety standards that go far beyond what's necessary and thus pushing costs prohibitively high. I still think so, and one of the challenges Republicans in Congress should take on is revising bringing those rules into conformity with the reality: that nuclear energy generation as practiced in the United States, in both military and civilian … [Read more...]
What Do “Green Jobs” Produce?
Cornwall Alliance advisory board member H. Sterling Burnett published a good piece in the Washington Times recently that rebuts claims about "Green jobs" in two ways. Burnett points out that in response to President Donald Trump's saying one reason to withdraw from the Paris climate accord was that staying in would drive energy prices higher, causing the loss of 6.5 million industrial jobs by 2040, supporters of wind and solar energy claim that job gains in wind and solar energy production … [Read more...]
Can We Get There from Here?
A tourist asks an Irish old-timer, "How do I get to Dublin?" The old-timer responds, "Well, you can't get there from here." That's what came to my mind when I read Michael Kelly's brief paper "A Challenge for Renewable Energies," at the Global Warming Policy Forum. The gist: "In recent years the energy sector has accounted for about 9 per cent of global GDP, with the implication that the return on energy investment [ROEI] in the world economy is, approximately and as an average, about … [Read more...]
Is the Trump Administration Brave Enough to Move Beyond “Energy Dominance”?
For half a century, Middle Eastern countries, many with Islamic fundamentalist regimes that have financed radical jihadi terrorists while oppressing women and persecuting non-Muslims, have dominated the world’s energy markets. More recently, Europe has been hostage to Russia for natural gas, crucial to its energy needs. In the last decade, revolutionary oil and gas drilling technologies have enabled the United States to change things. The Trump Administration is putting that historic … [Read more...]
How Did America Become the World’s #1 Energy Producer?
The United States has been the world's #1 producer of natural gas for eight years now, and of oil for three---realities that are only slowly dawning on the broad public that still tends to think in terms of the olden days when Russia dominated the former and Saudi Arabia the latter. The result? Lower prices for Americans, yes. But also for people around the world. And less income for nasty regimes like the Saudis' Islamic fundamentalists (women can't drive or vote, thieves' hands are cut … [Read more...]
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