Category archive: Green Economy
California Assembly Outlaws Economics 101
By Chuck Roger • April 12th, 2011 12:00 am
By Chuck Rogér The California Assembly has passed a bill, which if signed by Governor Brown, will legally compel power companies to generate a third of the state’s electricity from sources such as solar, wind, and geothermal energy by 2020, a 1000 percent increase in nine years. Peter Miller, a senior scientist at the NRDC [...]
Reality-blind solar power pushers
By Chuck Roger • February 3rd, 2011 12:30 am
Put on your best acting face. Imagine running a power company. You charge your customers $100 per megawatt-hour of electricity. One day, government officials show up at your office to force you to pay ten times this rate–$1000 per megawatt-hour–for excess power that these same government officials force you to buy from homeowners with solar [...]
New America Foundation president pushes carbon tax and ‘green’ economic fallacies
By Chuck Roger • December 14th, 2010 5:50 am
Republicans seem poised to get the Bush tax cuts extended. This has contributed to a “dismal two weeks for [Obama's] economic policy,” says Ted Halstead in a Financial Times commentary. Halstead is founder and president of the New America Foundation. When you see “New America” in the name of an organization, you know that you’re [...]
Wind power economic fallacies hurt Americans
By Chuck Roger • November 18th, 2010 1:50 am
Proponents of “renewable” energy sources (invariably the same people who criticize nuclear power) often resort to an economic fallacy to push solar and wind power. The proponents point out that in raw dollars, nuclear power gets taxpayer subsidies far greater than “renewable” sources receive. Yes, nuclear power draws huge raw dollar subsidies because it accounts [...]
Wind power fanatics are the Smart Car drivers of the ‘renewable energy’ universe
By Chuck Roger • August 26th, 2010 3:14 am
Time to make fun of green weenies again. This time, we head to Texas. Writing in Slate magazine, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Robert Bryce reports that Texas electricity demand hit a record high 63,594 megawatts on August 4, 2010. Good thing the state has more wind turbine capacity than any other state, huh? In fact, [...]
Newsflash for greenies: Wind is unpredictable
By Chuck Roger • July 28th, 2010 12:30 am
First the unsurprising fact: In Scotland, wind turbines are yielding far less than the “expected” levels of electrical power–about half. Now the government’s comical response: Blame “unusually calm weather.” But unless you live in the Kerguelen Islands of the extreme southern Indian Ocean, the most consistently windy place on Earth, you’d kinda sorta already know [...]
Wind power jobs pay infinite salaries
By Chuck Roger • March 31st, 2010 9:51 pm
Ah, what I could do with infinite income. Travel all the time. Go fishing… a lot… like every day. Give all my money to charities of my choice, which of course means infinite charities since there’d be infinite money. But I couldn’t give all the money away anyway, because it’d be infinite! What to do? A quick [...]
The color green, eco-zealots, and economic suicide
By Chuck Roger • February 28th, 2010 10:10 pm
If you live in Portland, Oregon, with unemployment exceeding the national average — in fact, over 10% — and one of the weakest economies in the weak but “green” Pacific Northwest, do you vote to: Revisit your “green” policies in light of how they further weaken the economy and increase unemployment; Ignore the problem and [...]
The folly of subsidizing green dreams
By Chuck Roger • January 10th, 2010 12:08 am
For politicians, “going green” is about the sort of green that politicians have a habit of pursuing and has little to do with “greening” the environment. At The Freeman online, Andrew Morriss explains. Unfortunately, the rhetoric about “greening the economy” or creating “green jobs” is just political window-dressing for some of the same central-planning measures [...]
It takes a lot of green to go green
By Chuck Roger • January 7th, 2010 12:07 am
A friend of mine is significantly invested in a start-up solar energy company, and I wish him well. I am personally cautious in the area of solar energy conversion technology. The principles behind solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and other scientifically exciting alternative energy sources are indeed solid. I was educated as a physicist and will always [...]



