on December 24, 2018

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Texas City Featured in Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Sequel’ Lost Millions in its Green Energy Gamble

Written by Isaac Orr

Michael Bastasch of the Daily Caller wrote a great article, which is a victory lap of sorts, about how the town of Georgetown, Texas, which was featured in former Vice President Al Gore's underwhelming sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth," is losing millions of dollars after it proudly declared it would power itself with only wind and solar energy. Georgetown’s bet against fossil fuel prices cost the city-owned utility nearly $7 million this year, and prompted officials to look for a way out of their long-term contracts for solar and wind energy. “It’s costing them big time,” vice president of research at the Texas Public Policy...

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on December 23, 2018

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Happy Festivus, Everyone!

Written by Isaac Orr

in Energy

Happy Festivus, Everyone! In case you're unfamiliar, Festivus is perhaps the holiest day of the year, where family members gather around an unadorned aluminum pole and air their grievances with each other. Keeping with this sacred tradition, I have a few grievances I'd like to air. In the words of St. Francis (Costanza): Mark Dayton: Policy disagreements are to be expected in life, that's fair, but to give 22 state employees huge raises on your way out the door is exactly why people on the left and right have lost confidence in politics and begun favoring populist candidates. Scott Walker As a native Wisconsinite I still...

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on December 18, 2018

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Guess Who’s to Blame for the Rise in Catastrophic Wildfires?

Written by Peter Zeller

in Energy

California Congressman Tom McClintock gives the answer in an illuminating op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal. Turns out our forests have become dangerously overcrowded ever since Congress passed costly environmental regulations in the 1970s. As a result 80% less timber is harvested from federal lands and fire now destroys a proportionally increased amount of acres. For a good chunk of the 20th century foresters paid for the ability to harvest excess timer, the forests thrived, and revenues supported forest management. Now land management is an expensive government cost and our beautiful forests have become a deadly firetrap. A half-century of environmental regulation hasn’t...

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on December 18, 2018

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New Technologies, Not Paris Climate Agreement, Will Do the Job

Written by Isaac Orr

in Energy

Wind and solar simply aren't working, and these inefficient and unreliable technologies are a key reason the Paris Climate Accord is a dismal failure. The article below is a sobering piece that sheds light on how the proposed "solutions" to carbon dioxide emissions have been expensive failures. The article below was originally published in The Financial Times. Since climate change began to gain political traction in 1990, very little has been achieved. The concentration of carbon in the atmosphere has kept going up. Lots of money has been spent, vested interests have profited, but the reality is that we remain well on course for...

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on December 17, 2018

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Assessing the Fourth “National Assessment” of Climate Change

Written by Isaac Orr

in Energy

Pat Michaels of the Cato Institute is brilliant on the climate change issue. If you are interested in this topic and haven't read his book, Lukewarming, I highly suggest you pick it up. Michaels recently wrote a blog about the highly publicized, but little scrutinized Climate Assessment that has been making headlines here in Minnesota. The blog post is below and he provides links to his extensive comments. The 1990 Global Change Research Act requires quadrennial “Assessments” of the effects of global climate change on the U.S. The first was published in 2000, the second in 2009 (the G.W. Bush Administration chose to...

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on December 14, 2018

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German Co2 Emissions Remain Stubbornly High

Written by Isaac Orr

in Energy

A lot of people I talk to about renewable energy in Minnesota think of Germany as a great example what we should be doing here. Green groups in the U.S. constantly characterize Germany's aggressive attempts to increase the amount of electricity generated by wind and solar as a smashing success, but unfortunately, these accounts fail to tell the whole story. In reality, Germany's "energy transition" has stalled, according to YaleEnvironment360. "Today, the Energiewende finds itself stalled and floundering. Germany’s carbon emissions have stagnated at roughly their 2009 level. The country remains Europe’s largest producer and burner of coal, which generates more than one-third of Germany’s power supply....

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on December 13, 2018

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Tempering the Alarm About Sea Level Rise

Written by Isaac Orr

in Energy

This article was written by Judith Curry, a climate scientist who was formerly a Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. New report on Sea Level Rise and Climate Change challenges the alarming predictions of 21st century sea level rise. “Antarctica meltdown could double sea level rise”. “The planet could become ungovernable”. Such headlines reflect the growing alarm over sea level rise. How worried should energy companies be about sea level rise? There are 287 energy facilities in the U.S. at coastal locations that are within 4 feet of typical high-tide level. More than half of these facilities are...

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on December 12, 2018

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Resources Are Almost 5 Times as Abundant as They Were in 1980

Written by Isaac Orr

in Energy

The following article originally appeared in Reason. Humanity is enjoying a world of increasingly cheap and ever more abundant mineral, agricultural, forestry and energy resources reports a brilliant new study, the Simon Abundance Index. This analysis by Marian Tupy,* editor of Human Progress at the Cato Institute, and Professor Gale Pooley from Brigham Young University – Hawaii uses data on 50 different commodities to track their price trajectories over the past 37 years from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. They find in real price terms their basket of commodities decreased by an average of 36.3 percent between 1980 and 2017. That's great, but their...

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on December 11, 2018

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Stauber and Nolan Push Last Ditch Passage of Mining Bill

Written by Tom Steward

in Energy

Congressman-elect Pete Stauber has a few more weeks before going to DC as Minnesota's new Eighth Congressional District representative. But the Republican isn't wasting any time getting behind bipartisan legislation introduced by his Democratic predecessor Cong. Rick Nolan to make way for more mining in northern Minnesota. The sooner, the better, preferably before Stauber's swearing in, according to the Duluth News Tribune. “We both strongly agree on the importance of environmentally safe mining in northern Minnesota,” Stauber said in his news release statement. “If this legislation doesn’t become law, one of my first acts in the 116th Congress will be to...

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on December 11, 2018

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No, Xcel’s Pledge to be Carbon-Free by 2050 Does Not Make Good Business Sense

Written by Isaac Orr

in Energy

Lee Schafer of the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote an article in the Sunday, December 9th edition of the newspaper stating that Xcel's pledge to generate 100 percent of its electricity from "carbon free" sources by 2050 made good business sense. Unfortunately, Xcel Energy's plan will only make "business sense" for Xcel, companies like Mortenson Construction that are financially invested in the renewable energy industry, Xcel's shareholders, and non-government organizations like Fresh Energy that promote renewable energy sources like wind and solar despite their high cost and low reliability. ...

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