energy — VOICES for REASON

We hear all the time about evil “speculators” driving up the price of oil and other forms of energy. But there is little explanation of what ”speculation” actually is. Yet understanding speculation is not only crucial to understanding these accusations and whether they hold water, but to understand the whole world of energy today. Therefore, the goal of this month’s Power Hour is to demystify speculation and debunk some popular myths about the practice.

To give us clarity on speculation, I brought in an expert on financial markets and speculation, Dr. Eric Dennis. Dr. Dennis was actually trained as a theoretical physicist at CalTech, Princeton, and Santa Barbara—but now works as a high-level executive at a major financial institution, using his mathematical skills to build complex models of financial markets. I have been fortunate enough to know Dr. Dennis for several years now, and he is my go-to person whenever I have a question about speculation or financial markets, since he knows them inside out and can break down the issues in plain English.

Listen to the episode and learn:

• What exactly is speculation?
• Is it a problem that speculation is growing in oil markets—or a good thing?
• Does speculation really drive up prices?
• Do speculators have undue influence over prices?
• What is hedging, and how do speculators make it possible?

And much more!

(By the way, if you want an easy way to fit Power Hour into your schedule, download it to your MP3 player and listen to it during your commute.)

Listen to or Download this month’s show.

Subscribe to Power Hour on iTunes.

Subscribe to Power Hour for other podcast programs.

In the latest issue of The Energy Advocate, editor and physicist Howard Hayden gives a thorough explanation of how different forms of light bulbs work, and why incandescent light bulbs are the most pleasing to most eyes. Here’s an excerpt:

Filaments in [incandescent] electric lamps are not as hot as the surface of the sun, yet the light they emit is very similar. Each one emits light in the entire wavelength range visible to the human eye . . . .

Incandescent lamps are notoriously inefficient, emitting less than 10% of the input power as visible light. The problem with more efficient sources like fluorescent lamps is that their light is not a continuous spectrum, but rather a handful of individual wavelengths. The effect is to distort colors of objects illuminated by the light.

Note that this “inefficiency” of incandescent light bulbs is the source of their scorn by the environmentalist left and their effective ban by the federal government. Energy Secretary Steven Chu reveals the mentality behind the ban when he says, smugly, of a law preventing individuals from buying the light bulbs they want: “We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”

What is Chu ignoring when he calls the choice to buy regular bulbs a “waste”?

Well, for one thing, he’s ignoring the fact that while incandescent light bulbs are not efficient in the sense of producing as much light per unit of energy as possible, they are incredibly efficient in the sense of producing the most desirable light for our money (including our energy). There is a rarely consulted passage of a rarely consulted document that champions “the pursuit of happiness.” When I choose to buy an incandescent light bulb, I do so because that gets me the best light for my money—with “best” emphatically including the quality of illumination I will enjoy as I read books, talk to friends, work in the evening, etc. To our government, such considerations are irrelevant; as long as I can fit neatly into government statistics that say I’m emitting less CO2 but I’m still alive and have access to illumination, why should it matter whether I enjoy my life more or less?

The ultimate standard of efficiency (be it energy efficiency, economic efficiency, or any other form) is the individual’s life and happiness. If anyone ever tells you that something you love is “inefficient,” and the cure is to shove something you hate down your throat, then “efficiency” has become a mere rationalization for tyranny.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

FoxNews.com has just released a new op-ed of mine on the nuclear safety issue. In the piece, entitled, “Nuclear Power Is Extremely Safe — That’s the Truth About What We Learned From Japan” I write that:

To think rationally about nuclear safety, you must identify the whole context. As the late, great energy thinker Petr Beckmann argued three decades ago in his contrarian classic “The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear,” every means of generating power has dangers and risks, but nuclear power “is far safer than any other form of large-scale energy conversion yet invented.”

To read the whole article, click here.

You can buy “The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear” here.

Finally, to listen to my discussion with Dr. Jay Lehr on nuclear safety on Power Hour, my monthly interview show on energy issues, click here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Alaska is the home of Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in American history. It is also the home of many other potentially momentous oil discoveries, which have for years been thwarted by the arbitrary, anti-development power environmental groups wield over the state. As Dave Harbour explains on MasterResource today, the situation has reached a critical juncture:

It is indisputable that for the last 2.5 years the Federal government has undertaken a campaign of economic genocide against Alaska.

The Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) is 2/3 empty and declining at a 6% annual rate while billions of barrels of oil lie untapped on federal lands…

The Obama Administration will have killed Alaska’s economy and thwarted America’s economic recovery if TAPS ceases operation for lack of readily available but off-limits federal oil.

As I have described in the Wall Street Journal, environmentalist opposition to Prudhoe Bay and the Alaskan pipeline helped contribute to America’s energy crisis of 1973. Make sure to reader Harbour’s whole post to understand what’s at stake today.

image: Wikimedia Commons

On the latest episode of Power Hour–the monthly Internet Radio Show where I interview today’s top energy experts to discuss today’s top energy issues–I talked to energy consultant Tom Tanton, an expert on the technology and the politics of “alternative energy.”

We hear all the time about the exciting promise of “alternative energy”–and the variations of it: “green energy,” “clean energy,” “renewable energy.” “Alternative energy,” roughly speaking, refer to sources of energy that are not successful on the market now but that proponents claim will be superior to market sources of energy, if only the government gets involved.

For instance, Al Gore, in arguing for the abolition of all CO2-emitting electricity, and much of CO2-emitting transportation by 2018, said that he knows of ”renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 per-gallon gasoline.”

On past shows we’ve looked at some of these so-called alternative energies on a technical level, understanding why it’s so hard for, say, solar panels to be affordable and reliable as a major source of energy. On this show we take a different angle. We are going to look at some of the history of how government-led alternative energy works in practice. How does it actually work when the government promotes wind turbines or electric cars?

To talk about this issue, I brought on Tom Tanton, a man who knows as much about the reality of alternative energy as anyone–because he worked for three decades at the California Energy Commission, which has spearheaded numerous alternative energy programs over the decades, including programs for just about every “new” technology we hear about today. I think you’ll learn a lot from this episode.

(By the way, if you want an easy way to fit Power Hour into your schedule, download it to your MP3 player and listen to it during your commute.)

Download this month’s show:

Subscribe to Power Hour on iTunes:

Subscribe to Power Hour for other podcast programs:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PowerHourWithAlexEpstein

Image: Wikimedia Commons

FoxNews.com has published my latest article, “Four Dirty Secrets about Clean Energy.” Here’s an excerpt:

“Clean energy” advocates often intimate that private investors and existing energy companies are too short-sighted to see the wondrous potential of their products. But this is far-fetched. Oil companies invest billions of dollars in research and development that will only pay off decades into the future. Can anyone doubt that with increasing worldwide demand for energy, they wouldn’t jump at the chance to add new sources of profitable energy to their portfolios? Or even if they are myopic, what about the enormous capital-allocating machine that is U.S. financial markets? Is Wall Street going to pass up on “one of the greatest new floods of wealth in history” by failing to make profitable investments?

But aren’t subsidies needed to correct some unfair advantage possessed by coal, oil, and natural gas? No. Solar and wind are the ones given an unfair advantage; per unit of energy produced, they already receive 90X more subsidies than oil and gas. And they have been subsidized for decades.

The one legitimate argument that energy investment in new technologies, including carbon-free ones, is too low is that heavy government taxation and environmental regulations drive many investors out of the energy sector. But “clean energy policies” such as cap-and-trade bills call for more taxes and regulations, not fewer.

The real reason why activists demand “clean energy policy” is simple: the “clean energy” sources they favor–especially solar and wind–are at present too expensive and unreliable to replace carbon-based fuels on a large scale. The only way activists can hope to have them adopted is to shove them down our throats.

Read the whole thing here, and be sure to share it on social media.

On the latest episode of Power Hour—the monthly Internet Radio Show where I interview today’s top energy experts to discuss today’s top energy issues–I talk to leading climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen.

Today’s discussion of energy policy is dominated by the claim that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are warming up the planet, with catastrophic results on the climate. We’re told that this is a matter of consensus among all the top scientists, and that the time for debate is over–it’s time for action.

Power Hour is a show based on the idea that to draw the right conclusions for action, you first need to be informed. And in my opinion the time for debate is certainly not over because the vast, vast majority of us don’t even know what the debate is about, let alone what has been proven and what hasn’t, let alone what the action implications are.

That’s why I decided to do this episode on climate science and climate change. One reason I brought on Dr. Lindzen in particular is that even though he is an extremely prestigious scientist, he doesn’t count on that prestige when he explains issues—in fact, he is very critical of the phenomenon of people taking the pronouncements of climate scientists on faith.

The purpose of this episode is not to definitively establish how much CO2 is impacting the climate. Rather, it’s to get a more objective idea of where the field of climate science actually is in answering that question. Is it really known that man-made CO2 is leading to catastrophic consequences, as many prominent figures claim? Is it really known that man-made CO2 is having only benign consequences, as other prominent figures claim? Listen to the show to hear Dr. Lindzen’s intriguing views on these and many other issues.

For more on this episode of Power Hour, and to be notified of future episodes, sign up for my free monthly newsletter (“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Energy”) here.

(By the way, if you want an easy way to fit Power Hour into your schedule, download it to your MP3 player and listen to it during your commute.)

Download an MP3 of this episode.

Subscribe to Power Hour on iTunes:

http://itun.es/iFK42H

Subscribe to Power Hour for other podcast programs:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PowerHourWithAlexEpstein

Image: Wikimedia Commons

On Earth Day I think it is a good time to mention a new article of mine—“Energy Privation: The Environmentalist Campaign Against Energy.” The article is my contribution to the new collection of essays called Why Businessmen Need Philosophy.

So why should businessmen care about Earth Day and the “green energy” movement? The answer is self-defense—intellectual self-defense against those who attack their activities and want to see businesses shackled with government controls and regulations. And one of the major threats that businessmen need to defend themselves against is the environmentalist movement.

Environmentalists claim that we need to change the way we use energy, and they make it seem as though they have a clear and practical plan for accomplishing this change. But what I argue in the article is that, in fact, environmentalist energy policy amounts to an all-out campaign against energy as such. It is “not a crusade to replace carbon-based fuels with something else, but a crusade to methodically eliminate any practical means of producing energy on an industrial scale.”

I discuss my view in more detail in the live Q&A session that took place this morning, which you can watch here, and in the article. See also these recent posts on VFR.

This Earth Day, the Ayn Rand Center wants to help you understand the destructive campaign environmentalists have pursued for decades against energy production.

Environmentalists say they only want to protect us from the dangers of CO2 emissions, but when you look at the history of what energy projects they oppose, it becomes clear that environmentalists are not so concerned about carbon emissions—they fight against every form of practical, cheap energy regardless of whether it emits CO2 (like fossil fuels) or not (like nuclear and hydro).

What is their real agenda? Should oil and nuclear be viewed as “dirty” and “dangerous?” Do solar and wind represent the future of energy as the environmentalists would have you believe? What did the recent tsunami in Japan actually reveal about the safety of nuclear energy?

Check out the materials on this blog by ARC writers and speakers that expose how environmentalists consistently oppose the kind of energy industrial development requires.

We also hosted a live Q & A session this morning from our headquarters in Irvine, CA, where resident fellows Dr. Keith Lockitch and Alex Epstein answered viewers’ questions about “green energy,” environmentalism, the recent nuclear scare in Japan, and related issues. A recording of this Q&A session can be viewed below.

Updates

“Greens vs. Energy” by Alex Epstein published in American Thinker

Keith Lockitch quoted in National Geographic article on Earth Day

Alex Epstein and Keith Lockitch discuss energy and environmentalism on the PJTV news show “Front Page”

Recording of Q&A session:

Read the rest of this entry »

Proponents of “green energy” claim that oil and coal are “dirty” addictions and that “renewable” energy sources, like solar and wind, represent the future of energy. Should we get on board with their plans?

Not according to ARC fellow Alex Epstein. Last Earth Day he wrote:

Fact: there are three proven categories of industrial-scale energy: carbon-based, which produces about 86% of the world’s energy; nuclear, which produces roughly 6%, and hydroelectric, which produces another 6%. Revealingly, most environmentalists oppose nuclear and hydroelectric (both emissions-free) as insufficiently “green”; in the last several decades they have successfully made nuclear plants nearly impossible to build and shut down hundreds of dams.

That means a meager 2% of energy is produced by “green” sources such as wind, solar, and plant/animal materials (“biomass”). Is this a case of promising technologies denied a chance to develop? Hardly; they have been heavily subsidized in the United States for decades. Consider: In 1977 Jimmy Carter proclaimed that he would “develop permanent and reliable new energy sources. The most promising, of course, is solar energy, for which most of the technology is already available.”

But even with decades of subsidies, “green” proposals have failed to deliver the industrial-scale energy required to fuel our cars, light our homes, and make possible the daily activities of our modern economy—like running hospitals, transporting goods, and growing food on an industrial scale.

Why do “green” alternatives like solar and wind perform so poorly? According to Mr. Epstein:

“Green energy” has failed because it lacks the physical properties necessary to provide industrial-scale power: a combination of abundance, high energy concentration, and reliability. For example, where coal, oil, and natural gas can be burned whenever power is needed, at the exact quantity needed, wind and sunlight can be harnessed only when the weather cooperates—and electricity can’t be stored for a rainy day. Thus, they are always used as supplemental, not primary, sources of power on electric grids. Statistics about Denmark getting 10% or 20% of electricity from solar and wind are misleading; that is the maximum they can get without seriously endangering the grid with power outages and electronics-frying power overloads.

Yet despite the physical shortcomings of “green” alternatives, their proponents continue to push for political programs that would force a shift to these meager energy forms. What would this mean for our daily lives? In his essay “Energy Privation: The Environmentalist Campaign Against Energy” in Why Businessmen Need Philosophy, ARC fellow Dr. Keith Lockitch considers what life would be like without industrial-scale energy. He says:

Today industrial-scale energy fuels a global trade worth trillions of dollars, with automated factory equipment churning out all manner of life-enhancing goods and with petroleum-powered trucks, freight trains, and cargo ships carrying them all over the planet.

Yet even today, large numbers of people still suffer for lack of industrial-scale energy. About 1.5 billion people have no electric lighting, refrigeration, computer technology, electronic devices or medical equipment—no access to electricity at all. About 2.5 billion people—more than one-third of the world’s population—have no source of energy for heating or cooking other than biomass fuels such as wood or animal dung, and the resulting smoke from open fires is a leading cause of death in undeveloped countries. The World Health Organization estimates that about 1.6 million people die every year from respiratory diseases directly attributable to indoor air pollution—almost as many as die annually from AIDS.

Similarly, for lack of freshwater and sewage infrastructure built and powered using industrial-scale energy, “over 1 billion people globally lack access to safe drinking-water supplies, while 2.6 billion lack adequate sanitation.” Consequently, “diseases related to unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene result in an estimated 1.7 million deaths every year.” And for lack of an adequate capacity for food production and distribution, chronic undernourishment affects more than 1 billion people. The result is that in parts of the world today—particularly in parts of Africa—life expectancy is under forty years. It hasn’t been that low in the industrialized world since the eighteenth century—and today, in industrialized countries life expectancy is closer to eighty years.

Industrial-scale energy is an indispensable, life-saving value. It has completely transformed human life for the better in the industrialized world. And the benefits of industrial development will come to undeveloped countries only if they develop the infrastructure for the large-scale production and use of energy, as India and China are currently doing.

All of the life-saving, life-enhancing goods and services we enjoy today in industrialized society require massive amounts of cheap, concentrated, and reliable energy—and solar and wind just don’t cut it. But if “green energy” proponents get their way, what quality of life can we expect in the future?

If you have questions about the “green energy” movement, be sure to submit them here and watch the live Q&A on Earth Day (tomorrow, Friday, April 22) at 9 a.m. PST via ARC’s Facebook page to hear your questions answered by Dr. Keith Lockitch and Alex Epstein.