Gas prices: If you look at inflation-adjusted gasoline prices over the last century, there has been an overall downward trend, reflecting greater efficiency at finding, pumping, and refining petroleum. We are now at $5 a gallon, but that isn't a whole lot more than we've been in the past (for example, just before the 2012 recession). Still, the price is a lot higher than it needs to be given current technology, and the current spike could have been mostly avoided (COVID impacts being the least … [Read more...]
Rolls-Royce’s SMR Needs 10,000 Times Less Land Than Wind Energy, Proves ‘Iron Law Of Power Density’
Last month, Rolls-Royce said that it expects to receive regulatory approval from the British government by 2024 for its 470-megawatt small modular reactor and that it will begin producing power on Britain's electric grid by 2029.Will that happen? Time will tell. Many nuclear projects and startups have blown past their projected in-service dates. But Rolls-Royce’s announcement is important for two reasons. First, it adds more credence to the notion that a global nuclear renaissance is, in fact, … [Read more...]
India’s “Bad Boys” Reopen 100 Coal Mines as Demand Skyrockets
Political leaders of developing countries face constant pressure to generate enough electricity for their populations as they are being asked to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. In a bold and rebellious move, India has ordered the reopening of more than 100 dormant coal mines to meet skyrocketing domestic power demand. The action is just one of the many measures that the country has taken to ensure a seamless supply of coal to power plants that generate more than 70 percent of the … [Read more...]
Pregnant People are Birthing Distrust of Science
There’s a real concern that the public is losing trust in the scientific establishment, and maybe for good reason. A recent news article in one of the world’s most prestigious science journals, Nature, contained an editor’s statement that sadly apologized for being insensitive to a new unscientific norm. The article was titled, “COVID vaccines safely protect pregnant people: The data are in.” The journal editor thought it was necessary to assure readers that, “Nature recognizes that transgender … [Read more...]
Germany’s Green Energy Fixation Should Teach US a Lesson
Germany’s new Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government vice chancellor and economic minister Robert Habeck, a leading member of his country’s Green Party, has experienced a rude lesson regarding the disastrous consequences of his years of naïve opposition to fossil fuels.After tasking his top officials to assess the energy security implications of Germany’s dependence on Russian supplies in the event of a then-looming Ukraine invasion, their conclusions were desperately dispiriting.Habeck reportedly … [Read more...]
Biased Reporting Overheats Climate Fear, Ignores Cold
It was a cold May night for many in the city of Bengaluru, India. The mercury dipped to 52 degrees Fahrenheit, a low not witnessed in the last 50 years.The same week, some Indian cities made global headlines not for unusual cold but for extreme heat. Followers of international news likely have seen reports about heat waves and historic high temperatures in South Asia.“India and Pakistan are no strangers to extreme temperatures, but the current heatwave stands out for its early-season … [Read more...]
Must Fossil Fuel Extraction Be Stopped to Limit Global Warming?
“Fossil Fuel Extraction Must Be Stopped to Limit Global Warming.” That’s the headline of an article at Earth.com, an environmental activist website. It purports to convey the message of a study published May 17, 2022, in Environmental Research Letters, “Existing fossil fuel extraction would warm the world beyond 1.5°C,” though the study makes no such claim.According to the study, the world is already committed, through its 25,000 oil and gas fields and 3,000 coal mines, to … [Read more...]
Income Distribution and Inequality
Italian economist and engineer Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) conjectured that for any population, income naturally follows a log-normal distribution. The normal, or Gaussian distribution ranges from negative to positive infinity with a central mean. Because logarithms are always positive, the log-normal distribution ranges from zero to positive infinity with a positive mean, consistent with there being no upper bound for the highest incomes. Pareto’s approximation describes the distribution of … [Read more...]
Operation Climate-Change Choke Point
In a 2020 article published in the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, Graham Steele described a detailed plan to use federal financial regulatory agency powers to implement a new national industrial policy without legislation. The plan was to use the powers of the financial regulatory agencies to restrict the flow of credit and capital to firms and activities that produce greenhouse gas emissions.The plan uses the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) to declare … [Read more...]
EVs on Fire! Electric Utopia Takes a Deadly U-Turn
Electric vehicles have been pushed hard as a solution to the world’s faux climate emergency, but in India, they have turned into killing machines. Many EV bikes and scooters have been bursting into flames across the country. The frequency of such incidents has increased considerably since spring 2022.In my home state of Tamil Nadu, a man and his daughter were killed when their EV scooter caught fire. You might think it as a one-off incident, but that is not the case.In March, an EV bike (from … [Read more...]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- …
- 30
- Next Page »
