Will ‘Video-Shaming’ Follow Our Summer of ‘Flight-Shaming’?

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.

If You Want ‘Renewable Energy,’ Get Ready to Dig

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…

Inconvenient Energy Realities

e21 ….   Bill Gates has said that when it comes to understanding energy realities “we need to bring math to the problem.” He’s right. Herein, then, is a summary of some of bottom-line realities from the underlying math behind “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking”

What if Green Energy Isn’t the Future?

WALL STREET JOURNAL ……  What’s Warren Buffett doing with a $10 billion bet on the future of oil and gas, helping old-school Occidental Petroleum buy Anadarko, a U.S. shale leader?  For pundits promoting the all-green future, this looks like betting on horse farms circa 1919.

Energy and the Information Infrastructure Part 5: Robots Eat Too: Huang’s Law & The Voracious Appetite of Artificial Intelligence

REAL CLEAR ENERGY …….. Will future bureaucrats impose CAFÉ-like fuel efficiency standards on the engines of artificial intelligence (AI)? After all, computing necessarily uses energy. And we know that AI computers under the hood of a useful robocar won’t have extension cords. If you do the math, when the all-robocar future does arrive, the energy used just…

Want an Energy Revolution?

CITY JOURNAL ……….  Throughout history, some 60 percent to 90 percent of every nation’s economy has been consumed by food and fuel costs. Hydrocarbons changed the way that humans organize their productive capacity. The coal age, followed by the oil age, and now by the ascendant age of natural gas, has (at least for developed…