Today: 31.Jan.2017

Howard Cork Hayden, Emeritus Professor of Physics: The solar industry employs 210,000 people, while there are only 190,000 employed in coal mines. Considering the tiny amount of solar electricity produced, the solar industry employs about 70 times as many people for the same amount of electricity. The coal industry is developing plans to compete with that kind of job creation. They will get rid of all that heavy machinery and hire millions of miners to use picks and shovels.

Published in Energy Today

Steven Lyazi is a student and day laborer in Uganda. He describes the problems facing people and the environment in Uganda and across much of Africa. Many serious problems are rooted in African society and government. Other problems are imposed on Africa by environmental activists, western powers and UN agencies dictate what issues are important – and use them to keep us poor and deprived: manmade climate change, no GMO foods, no DDT to prevent malaria, using wind and solar power and never building coal, natural gas or nuclear power plants. This is a criminal trick that denies basic rights to affordable energy, jobs and modern living standards.

Published in Uganda

The American Interest: Germany’s much-ballyhooed green energy transition—its energiewende—has run up quite a tab, and policymakers are having trouble figuring out who is actually going to pay for the policies. In an attempt to kick-start fledgling renewable energy sources like wind and solar power, Berlin guaranteed producers locked-in, long-term, above-market rates called feed-in tariffs. To their credit, this plan of pushing technologies of dubious merit at any cost worked, perhaps too well

Published in Energy Today

Amory Lovins, long time anti-nuclear power advocate: As the Italian proverb says, arithmetic is not an opinion. So let’s do the math. Renewables and efficiency cost less than operating many nuclear plants. That's right, arithmetic is not an opinion, but garbage numbers and unsound assumptions into the arithmetic leads to worthless numbers out. Same for computer models for climate science. "Efficiency," code for using less energy, obviously costs less than producing energy. The public listens to what they want to hear. So his article, celebrating the agreement with Friends of the Earth and the Natural Resources Defense Council to close the last operating nuclear power plant in California will be music to anti-nuclear power advocates and a sad tragedy for most of humanity and the environment. Lovins talks about "carbon" not carbon dioxide. Carbon is diamonds. Carbon dioxide is a colorless, oderless gas that is essential for all life! So he wants to do the math!!

Published in Energy Today