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The Rocky Mountain Foundation has neither “pets” nor “enemies” in the energy mix. We believe the evidence tells us that energy sources long in use like oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear remain indispensable. We also believe that renewable electricity sources like solar and wind, touted for decades but still in their commercial infancies today, might become a significant part of the mix in the future but are unlikely to replace fossil fuels in our lifetime. Yet, in truth, we need not choose between the two "baskets." We should encourage the pursuit of new technologies without discriminating against the proven and reliable energy sources that remain essential for both industrial and residential power . Thus, the policy of "all of the above" is the more rational course of action for the foreseeable future.
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Read the full text of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and then ponder the fate of economic freedom and jobs on mainstreet, USA, if the U.S. Senate ratifies the expanded version of this treaty that will emerge from the Copenhagen meeting in December.
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As residents of the Rockies either complain of colder, snowier winters, or revel in the terrific skiing they produce, more and more eyebrows are being raised in response to the global warming claims of former vice president Al Gore and others. Those claims, for example, underpin statutory requirements forcing Coloradans to pay a growing subsidy for electricity from sources that free markets apparently won’t yet support.
On another side of our regional economy, producers of fuels like coal, oil and natural gas are important high-paying employers. They are also major contributors to the tax bases of the states and many political subdivisions. They also face non-stop challenges from interests such as those competing for land use or opposed on environmental grounds.
Many share a concern that our state and federal governments’ energy policies are influenced by ideology – and science that may have become so politicized as to be a replay of the tragedy of eugenics a century ago – rather than by real science and sound economics.
Examining and reporting on this important subject will be Rocky Mountain Foundation’s initial policy focus.
Note: As George Santayana reminded us, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Read here what history teaches about politicized science and pseudoscience.
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Coloradans depend heavily on electricity and natural gas delivered by Minneapolis-based utility giant Xcel Energy. However, they should not depend on that company for fair and balanced commentary to help guide public policy.
More on that here.
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Environmentalism's Big Lie: Renewable Energy
That is the title of Jack Wakeland’s article published more than eight years ago in The Intellectual Activist (read it here). RMF president John Dendahl notes that the title is as fair today as it was in 2001 or, for that matter, nearly 40 years ago when he first began following the environmentalist movement and its sophist objections, one after another, to all significant sources of energy.
This Web site page has a related earlier entry, Rocky Mountain News editorial pages editor Vincent Carroll’s ridicule of Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter’s propagandizing the “New Energy Economy.” Ritter’s jobs propaganda came largely from a Boulder outfit, the American Solar Energy Society. A hilarious apologia for that society’s report comes from its executive director and can be read here in the February 4 Rocky.
No one claims that a job installing windows or repairing water heaters isn’t important. However, think of the screams of foul from Ritter and his New Energy Economy pals in Boulder if operators of a nuclear power plant claimed credit for employing those same people?
Carroll was right in a sequel he wrote to the column linked above: "In short, it's an inflated, meaningless number compiled by including all sorts of jobs – in insulation, window replacement and so on – that existed long before the New Energy Economy was so much as a gleam in any governor's eye. Not that the study's authors care. Their goal is to get that 91,000 figure repeated often enough so that it takes on a life of its own. Bogus or not, it will still serve its purpose.”
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Carbon-free fad is a recipe for economic disaster
In an op-ed published by the Rocky Mountain News, John Dendahl cites some large Colorado companies as appeasers, defined by Winston Churchill as “one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."
Read Dendahl’s op-ed here.
You Can’t Have It Both Ways, Fellas
“Tim Wirth, Ted Turner, Al Gore, et al, have the resources to know that nuclear energy must be used far more extensively if they are serious about a transition away from fuels that produce carbon dioxide. Until they advocate nuclear energy, their worry about global warming should be considered a flat-out lie and ignored.”
Read John Dendahl’s letter in The Denver Post here.
Gov. Ritter spreads “New Energy Economy” propaganda
Public policy development is skewed by outrageous claims made by public officials either favoring or disfavoring an energy source. Last October, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter larded up his rhetoric in favor of the so-called “New Energy Economy” with the claim that some 90,000 Colorado jobs had been created by “the renewable energy industry.”
The Ritter claim was lifted from a report out of Boulder from the American Solar Energy Society. Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages at the Rocky Mountain News, opined as to what he discovered when he “looked beneath the covers” of that society’s promotional report.
Vladimir Lenin famously said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” A few years later, Adolph Hitler said something similar and his chief of propaganda Joseph Goebbels said, “It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.”
Cautionary note to Gov. Ritter: Lenin, Hitler and Goebbels aren’t good models.
Read Vincent Carroll’s commentary here.
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Nobel Gaffe – Peace Laureate Gore Is a Threat to Peace
John Dendahl observes an irony: a man whose policies are more likely a threat to peace than a path to it received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Read Dendahl’s article here. Or here.
Al Gore slipping badly
Rasmussen Reports has released results of a new poll on global warming. The American public is coming around to believing that long-term planetary trends, not activities of mankind, are the cause of global warming.
In less than a year, the percentage blaming mankind has dropped from 47 to 41 percent while belief that it is planetary trends jumped from 34 to 44 percent.
Investor’s Business Daily wonders editorially why, when “ [g]lobal warmongers have been hectoring the public for years about the dangers of Earth overheating due to man's emissions of carbon dioxide,” global warming ranked last of 20 issues in a recent Pew Research poll with only 30 percent citing it as a top priority.
Like Rasmussen, Pew has found large annual drops for global warming among public concerns. Former Vice President Al Gore famously claims the debate is over and mankind is the culprit. Gore may be soon be right but find himself on the losing side!
Read the Rasmussen report here.
Read the Investor’s Business Daily editorial here.
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