Training thunderstorm activity is notorious for producing flash flood disasters.
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July 8, 2025 at 01:32AM
Category: Daily News
Matt Ridley has written an excellent article on this in the Telegraph (4th July) He points out that the Met Office make alarmist predictions based on an impossible scenario called RCP 8.5 which assumes we burn ten times as much coal in 2100 as we did in 2000 and that the world’s population grows to 12 billion – way more than any demographer thinks is likely. Also there is no improvement in technology to make us more efficient – completely mad! In 2020 the BBC admitted that this scenario was very unlikely. And yet the Met Office will not see sense.
Matt thinks they are using this deliberately in order to scare people by grabbing headlines. They believe their reputation is such that they are untouchable, but they may have miss-judged this and over-reached themselves. More and more people are beginning to look more closely at this taxpayer funded organisation and wondering exactly what are they up to other than weather forecasting.
via climate science
July 8, 2025 at 01:30AM
Editor’s Note: Master Resource’s founder and editor, Rob Bradley, is currently struggling with the aftermath of torrential flooding in the Texas Hill Country. Until he can return to work, he has asked me to post “classic” MR entries. The following surely qualifies. It is a review of the book that he and Richard Fulmer published in 2004, and that gave its name to this blog.—Roger Donway, Managing Editor.
This book review was published just short of 20 years ago in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics [Vol. 8, No. 3 (FALL 2005): 93–95] by Pierre Desrochers of the University of Toronto.
“Austrian economists have so far contributed very little to energy studies…. This book could therefore go a long way in providing a new set of concrete economic examples and principles for use in classroom discussions.”
Despite its obvious economic and social importance, energy (broadly understood) is an understudied field. True, among academics, one can find several engineers and geologists, along with some economists, geographers, legal scholars, and political scientists, who devote much of their research efforts to devising and/or analyzing various energy-related technologies, supply sources, markets, and institutions.
By and large, however, very few individuals have tried to understand how all the various parts of the energy puzzle fit—or not—together, and much—if not most—of the public discussion of the issue is agenda-driven and ignorant of basic physical and economic principles.
One part of the problem is, of course, the sheer scope of energy-related issues. Another is the fact that, despite often significant regulatory obstacles and ill-advised policies, energy markets have functioned rather smoothly over the last two centuries and have provided consumers with an ever growing, affordable and reliable supply of fossil fuels and electrical power. Indeed, widespread popular and academic interest in “big picture” energy studies has historically been limited to short-lived crisis episodes.
As readers of this review are surely aware, however, we are currently at the end of a half-decade that has witnessed, among other things, a second Gulf war, the California energy crisis, the Enron debacle, massive grid failure and power outages in the northeast United States, Scandinavia, and Italy, and the ratification of a gigantic and highly publicized energy-rationing scheme known as the Kyoto Protocol.
Capitalizing on these and other concerns, several popular books on energy have hit the bookshelves in the last few years, usually promoting one of two theses. According to proponents of the first and dominant perspective, the world will soon run out of cheap oil, which will drag our economies down the drain. Authors belonging to the second—and smaller—group argue to the contrary that fossil fuel abundance, and its concomitant carbon dioxide emissions, will result in a human-induced climate change of epic—and catastrophic—proportions.
In both fields, one is likely to learn that a new generation of subsidized renewable energy technologies has come of age and could replace, with some “political will,” the polluting output of “big oil” firms. Almost nowhere, however, are lay readers presented with a more sober and realistic perspective according to which the institutional framework of market economies has always been conducive to greater resource creation than depletion, that increased carbon dioxide concentrations will have benefits as well as costs, and that past and current energy crisis can typically be traced back to political interventions rather than physical shortages or market failures.
Of course, one can always find some reasonable textbook (Boyle, Everett, and Ramage 2003) and work on synthesis (Smil, 2003) that will hint at this perspective, but they are not targeted at a broad audience.
It is in this context that Robert L. Bradley and Richard W. Fulmer’s primer, Energy: The Master Resource is so valuable. Unlike almost every other popular book on the subject, it is squarely rooted in the optimistic tradition that was best exemplified by the late Julian Simon. Indeed, the title reflects Simon’s observation that, if human ingenuity is the “ultimate resource” that created all others, energy is the “master resource” that enables human beings to convert one material into another.
Bradley and Fulmer deal succinctly with the basic physical concepts, history, technology, economics, and public policy of energy. They discuss both long term trends and recent controversies in a nontechnical and abundantly illustrated way that will appeal to students, policymakers, and the interested public. As the authors point out, virtually all energy-related long term trends in advanced economies are positive.
For example: Our energy supply is becoming more abundant and affordable, not less. Despite the dire predictions of generations of energy pessimists, so-called “non-renewable” energy sources have become more abundant. In 1944, crude oil proved reserves were 51 billion barrels worldwide. After 58 years of production, reserves had grown to 1,266 billion barrels. Today, the average laborer can buy a week’s worth of gasoline and electricity for about 90 minutes of work, while the same amount of energy cost a full workday in 1920.
Creative engineers and technicians are forever finding new ways to extract more power out of a given set of inputs. In the United States, the amount of electricity produced by nuclear plants has increased by 25 percent during the 1990s while the number of nuclear plants fell from 112 to 104. This was made possible by raising the aver-age capacity utilization factor of the remaining plants to 89 percent from 69 percent.
Our cities are getting cleaner, not more polluted. In the “good old days” of the horse and buggies era, animal power turned city streets into “filthy breeding grounds for disease, reeking of manure and urine and swarming with flies” and in every big city 10,000 to 15,000 horse carcasses had to be cleared from the streets every year. Between 1970 and 2002, market incentives, improved technologies and new laws and regulations helped reduce emissions of the so-called “criteria air pollutants” in the United States from anywhere between 17 percent (nitrogen oxides) and 98 percent (lead).
In the future, technological improvements and capital turnover (the replacement of older vehicles, machines, and power plants with newer, more efficient equipment) promise to continue to improve the quality of our air and water even as energy consumption increases. The authors also discuss objectively the limitations of “alternative” power sources. They remind the reader that biomass, wind, and solar electricity generation have been around for a very long time and were displaced by fossil fuels in the nineteenth century because of physical and economic limitations that have yet to be overcome.
Bradley and Fulmer are also at their best in explaining in a succinct way the political causes of the recent energy crisis, from price controls to badly designed regulations, and in providing a fairly balanced discussion of energy and climate change complete with technology-based alternatives to the Kyoto Protocol.
As someone who teaches an undergraduate interdisciplinary course on “Energy and Society,” I can personally attest that this latter section will prove eye-opening to students who have been fed years of doom-and-gloom environmental discourse and who would not be receptive to a “do nothing” approach to the issue.
Austrian economists have so far contributed very little to energy studies. While few readers of this journal might feel an inclination to pursue detailed inquiries in this area, I suspect that several energy-related cases discussed in this book would provide nice illustrations of basic economic principles such as opportunity cost, decision-making in the face of uncertainty, and the unintended, but utterly predictable, consequences of short-sighted governmental interventions. This book could therefore go a long way in providing a new set of concrete economic examples and principles for use in classroom discussions. I strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in public policy issues who would like to get a quick, but well-rounded, education on energy matters.
REFERENCES
Boyle, Godfrey, Bob Everett, and Janet Ramage. 2003. Energy Systems and Sustainability. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smil, Vaclav. 2003. Energy at the Crossroads. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
The post Energy: The Master Resource (by Robert L. Bradley Jr. and Richard W. Fulmer) appeared first on Master Resource.
via Master Resource
July 8, 2025 at 01:01AM
Audrey Streb
DCNF Energy Reporter
Democrat policies and new regulations hiked California’s gas prices on Tuesday, and a slew of green energy initiatives has led to refinery closures and lofty gas prices in the Golden State that may soon spiral into a full-blown crisis.
California is teetering on the brink of a gas crisis due primarily to Democrats’ green energy policies, as multiple major refineries prepare to shutter in the coming years and more stringent regulations on the oil and gas industries take effect. Democratic leadership and regulators enacted adjustments to California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) program on Tuesday, resulting in a gas price increase that may be the beginning of further pain at the pump for the state’s consumers.
“Not every Californian is a millionaire like our governor is … and these regulations are bearing down on the average Californian and making California unaffordable,” Republican California Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “I’m addressing the cost of gasoline in California and trying to do everything I can to repeal the regulations that are causing it to go up, while at the same time alerting Californians of the impending cost of gasoline.” (RELATED: California Democrats Rail Against Energy Regulations They Unleashed As Gas Crisis Looms)
I just filed a public records request to expose how Newsom’s deceptive 65-cent gas price hike was crafted in secret.
We believe the real goal is to jack up gas prices so high that Californians are forced to buy EVs.
The public deserves the truth. #FixCalifornia pic.twitter.com/UVpzs1Qt7k
— Brian W. Jones (@SenBrianJones) May 21, 2025
California has the highest tax on gasoline in the nation, and its cap-and-trade program for emissions has also been connected to high energy prices in the state. The combination of these stringent regulations and the forthcoming closures of the Phillips 66 and Valero refineries in the state could result in gas shooting up to $8 per gallon as soon as 2026, according to one study from the University of Southern California.
Moreover, state regulators have suggested increasing state involvement in refinery management, including the possibility of what critics have derided as state-owned refineries to address the possible surge in gas prices.
Though gas prices have been hitting a four-year low across the U.S. ahead of Independence Day, Californians paid an average of about $4.57 per gallon as of Thursday, about $1.40 more than the national average, according to AAA gas price data. Prices increased in California by a few cents on Tuesday as adjustments to the state’s LCFS came into effect.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom set a goal to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2045, and he has fought to enact numerous green energy initiatives in his state, including an aggressive electric vehicle (EV) agenda.
California regulators planned to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles in the state and numerous others by 2035 before President Donald Trump signed Congressional resolutions to block the de facto EV mandate. California and ten other Democrat-led states immediately sued the Trump administration after the president terminated the Golden State’s de facto national EV mandate.
“The founding fathers would be rolling over in their graves if they ever thought the government would be in the business of dictating the type of transportation that Americans can choose,” Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research (IER) told the DCNF previously about California’s EV mandate. “The public is behind President Trump and the effort to preserve our ability to choose the types of cars that best suit our needs as consumers.”
Jones suspects the possible gas crisis is part of a broader effort by some Democrats to steer consumers to ditch conventional cars, noting that his office filled out a records request for emails between Newsom’s administration and the California Air Resources Board (CARB).
“The goal here is to show by their communications that they are purposefully trying to drive up the price of gasoline so that people are forced into EVs, public transportation or bicycles,” Jones told the DCNF.
The records request Jones filed has gone unanswered, the lawmaker told the DCNF, who noted that he has demanded an audit on the LCFS to find out if CARB comprehensively estimated the policy’s economic impacts or “concealed or downplayed costs.” CARB and Newsom’s office did not confirm to the DCNF whether or not they responded to the records request, though Newsom’s office referred the DCNF to several press releases that address some of Jones’ claims and noted that gas prices in the state are at a three-year low for July.
CARB initially cited estimates that the amendments to the LCFS could spike gas prices by 47 cents per gallon in 2024, according to multiple reports. The agency later walked back that projection in June, citing estimations that prices may only experience a per gallon hike of only five or six cents.
Newsom’s office also recently released a statement referencing a gasoline cost increase projection of eight cents per gallon. Jones described this shift in estimates as a “defensive scramble,” and cited a different estimate forecasting that the regulation shift could spike gasoline prices by as much as 65 cents per gallon in the near term. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: ‘A Lot Of Government Coercion’: Study Slams ‘Forced Transition’ To EVs Consumers Don’t Seem To Want)
Jones argued that if California Democrats plan to drive up fuel costs to force consumers to adopt EVs or ditch gasoline vehicles, it would be impossible to implement anyways. The state’s electrical grid is increasingly reliant on green energy technology, and “wind and solar is not going to cut it here in California,” Jones said. Building more EV infrastructure and charging the EVs would take power the state does not have, Jones argued.
“I’m focused on raising awareness and holding Governor Newsom, legislative Democrats, and unelected bureaucrats accountable for these costly and ineffective policies,” Jones said, railing against “unelected” regulators that have implemented strict energy policies that may necessitate a net-zero transition. “They’re out of control.”
Notably, California imports mass amounts of oil despite being “a very oil rich state,” Jones said. “We have plenty of oil in the ground, we just need to extract it,” he continued.
Citing the over 40,000 signatures on his petition to repeal the recent regulation change, Jones argued that he is witnessing an ideological shift in California.
“After Republicans and the media exposed the truth, Californians were outraged … [and they] are waking up. They’re starting to see that the reason for sky-high gas prices is irresponsible policies pushed by the majority party,” Jones said, referencing Newsom’s policies that seem to be driving up gas prices for the sake of “arbitrary climate targets.”
CARB did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
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July 8, 2025 at 12:07AM
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