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.
NATIONAL REVIEW .…….. Summer 2019 saw the duke of Sussex and Mayor Pete Buttigieg both apologizing for the “sin” of flying private, given the supposedly drastic effect it has on the climate. And in August, to much media hoopla, a Swedish teenage “climate warrior” sailed to New York to encourage everyday folks to stop flying so much.
WALL STREET JOURNAL ….. Democrats dream of powering society entirely with wind and solar farms combined with massive batteries. Realizing this dream would require the biggest expansion in mining the world has seen and would produce huge quantities of waste. “Renewable energy” is a misnomer. Wind and solar machines and batteries are built from nonrenewable…