Robert Bryce, author of “Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper,” captures the headlong rush of Western culture’s endless drive for ever better technology. It is an extraordinary impulse that has created a world in which more people live longer and more comfortably than ever before. Mr. Bryce’s policy prescriptions will be more welcome in Houston than in the White House. He contends that the pantheon of environmentalists like Mr. Gore, Bill McKibben, Amory Lovins and Greenpeace are wildly optimistic in their extravagant hopes for wind power, solar cells and biofuels.

Robert Bryce writes on energy, politics and other topics - There is a clash between the pro-nuclear New Guard Greens, many of whom call themselves “ecomodernists,” and the anti-nuclear Old Guard Greens, led by groups like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. These "green" "environmentalists" are out to "save the world" some times without regard for humanity. EFN-International and EFN-USA define an environmentalist as ordinary people who are respectful of the environment.

India is set to overtake China as the biggest importer of power-station coal. Indian thermal-coal imports will surpass China’s by 2017 or sooner, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts William Foiles and Andrew Cosgrove said in a report.

China, the world’s biggest energy consumer, is cutting down on coal use to fight pollution. India and its regional peers including Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan and South Korea plan to increase their combined coal-fired generating capacity by more than 204 gigawatts, or 60%, through 2019, as per the report.

Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Center for Energy Policy and the Environment at the Manhattan Institute. In theory, the March 11, 2011, disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant should have bolstered environmentalists’ opposition to new nuclear-energy projects. But in the wake of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, some of the world’s leading Greens have done just the opposite: they have come out in favor of nuclear power.