My mother informed me during my annual July 4 visit to her house that I’m getting more gray hair. Thanks for that information, Mom. I can do things such as exercise and stretch to keep my body in a youngish condition but I’ve never heard of anything not fake that keeps non-silver hair growing from my melon like a chia pet. As I’ve gotten older I have taken a much greater interest in history to determine cause and effect. While figures never lie and liars never figure, or something to that affect, I think I can look at data and…
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As my crop of silver hair continues to expand, I have become more of a historian, particularly when it comes to cause and effect, and peoples’ behavior. I step back and observe what is happening and what has happened as a result of this or that policy. Theories are nice, and they may be well thought out and make sense but if they fail miserably, should we double down and try it again? Policy isn’t like launching rockets or breaking the speed of sound. For those things, you can test, observe failure/problems and make adjustments. For example, Chuck Yeager was…
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An overarching theme of the Energy Rant is that much energy policy has a feel-good foundation of fluff. Last week I ranted about the feel-good dream of having plentiful, inexpensive renewable energy. This will take a miracle because conventional sources are still huge and growing. We have enough coal, natural gas, tar sands, oil shale, and offshore energy to last beyond our kids’ great grandchildren. Of course most readers of this are champions of energy efficiency, but energy efficiency also has too much feel-good fluff. Consider compact fluorescent lights, which despite my rant about it’s mandate a few weeks ago…
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It’s been about a month since I prognosticated and reflected on the BP disaster in the golf. Let’s see how things have unfolded. My predictions: Political food fight Underestimated disaster Lack of “what if” on BPs part Where is the outrage? First, I said politicians would engage in a political food fight while Rome burns. Sure enough, less than a week after that post, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee assembled a dog and pony show to poke executives of BP, Transocean, and Halliburton with a stick in the eye. Actually, it was like a dog show alright –…
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