REAL CLEAR ENERGY ………. In a time long ago, seven years this month, President Obama and candidate Mitt Romney sparred in their second debate over the extent to which Obama deserved credit for increasing America’s oil and natural gas production. Three years later President Obama would, without fanfare, sign epic legislation reversing a 40-year-old petroleum export ban.
CITY JOURNAL …… New York Senator Chuck Schumer has promised that if Democrats win the Senate in 2020, they’ll pass a law requiring that every car in America be electric by 2040. Chinese policymakers must be celebrating, because China makes the majority of the world’s batteries and has the most new battery factories under construction. The Chinese will need…
HART ENERGY ……… A growing chorus of voices is exhorting the public, as well as government policymakers, to embrace the necessity—indeed, the inevitability—of society’s transition to a “new energy economy.” Advocates claim that rapid technological changes are becoming so disruptive and renewable energy is becoming so cheap, so fast, that there is no economic risk…
NATIONAL REVIEW ……….. Silicon technology launched the computer age. But it took a breakthrough in chemistry to untether computers from desktops and connect over three billion people on earth to the Internet. Hence the well-deserved 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared by three scientists, for the lithium-ion battery.
CITY JOURNAL………..Electric vehicles stand at the center of every “green energy” initiative. Multiple jurisdictions mandate and subsidize the inevitable transition to “clean” transportation. Some policymakers have gone further, setting deadlines for outright bans on the internal-combustion engine (ICE), and Green pundits regularly issue forecasts promising the imminent dominance of electric vehicles (EVs).
NATIONAL REVIEW ..……… At the dawn of the 21st century the National Academy of Sciences published a retrospective on the previous century’s most important inventions. The top three on the list were, in this order: the electric grid, the automobile and airplane.