John Hinderaker:
One of the climate alarmists’ most intractable problems is the disproportion between the problems their models forecast and the solutions they propose. That is, if you believe the models, there is no remotely plausible course of action we can follow that makes a perceptible difference. So our impoverishment is pointless.
Jazz Shaw:
The proposed Native American monument would cover more than one million acres of land. While the indigenous people of the region should certainly have a voice in this debate, the creation of this monument would be disastrous for the country’s energy grid in the future. Those lands contain the richest deposits of uranium in our country and ongoing mining operations that could power many new nuclear reactors for the coming century or more. But if the land is designated as a national monument, all mining operations aside from the single existing uranium mine in the region will be banned.
David Strom:
The Proximal Origins paper—the cornerstone of the efforts to silence discussion about how COVID developed, spread into the human population, and of course about how we conduct biological research—was nothing but a fraud. If it turns out that COVID was spread by some bat or pangolin was the case, the paper is still a fraud.
Not only should it be retracted. People need to lose their jobs, their careers, and their reputations. That is the least that should happen. It happened to many of the people they slandered.
They committed a fraud. There must be consequences. A retraction of the paper would be only a start. Unfortunately, it likely won’t happen.
John Hinderaker:
Why might this make Burgum a strong contender? Because energy is the most important issue now before us. The Left is trying to destroy our economy, drastically lower our standard of living, and turn our future over to the Chinese Communist Party by abandoning our world-leading energy resources, and instead requiring us to use idiotic “green” technologies that don’t work, will never work, and are controlled by the Chinese, who use coal to run the plants that manufacture our pathetic wind turbines and solar panels. All of this is being done in the name of “climate change.”
This attack on our future is more threatening, and more important, than anything else that is now happening. How many politicians understand that? Not many. Some have been seduced by “green” propaganda—or, likely, by “green” money. Others are mentally squishy and subscribe to “all of the above” cliches without having any understanding of the Left’s agenda.
Who knows? Twenty years from now, it might be obvious that what we needed more than anything else in 2024 was a president who understands energy. That makes Doug Burgum worth a look.
John Hinderaker:
In other words, we are happy to invest trillions of dollars, but you have to take the risk out of the deal by guaranteeing our return. That is, of course, what is already happening with investor owned utilities. But as costs continue to skyrocket, more resources are needed to flow into the inexhaustible maw of the “green” boondoggle. Supply and demand won’t do the trick. Consumers won’t support the effort. So the only solution is using taxpayer money to guarantee private sector returns.
Thus the “green” train chugs onward. An utter failure in the marketplace, but still a darling of the political world, where politicians don’t spend their money. They spend yours.
John Hinderaker:
So MISO knows wind turbines are mostly useless. It plans on getting only 18% of wind energy’s rated capacity. Sometimes, of course, it gets more because it happens to be windy. But under extreme hot or cold conditions, wind tends to die down. Over the last two weeks, there have been periods when wind turbines produced virtually nothing—down to only around 6% of their alleged capacity.
The idea that we can replace coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants that operate reliably, 24/7, with wind turbines and solar panels that produce electricity only occasionally, is absurd. And yet that is the policy that the Democratic Party has declared. All of us will soon pay a fearful price for that fantasy.
Robert Bryce:
One final point: imagine how much further along the world would be today if the $4.1 trillion spent on wind and solar over the past 18 years had, instead, been spent on developing and deploying the next generation of nuclear power plants. That would be an energy transition worth writing about.
Via
John Hinderaker.
