Category Archives: Energy

That’s the title of a fantastic post by Bjørn Lomborg taking to task the Club of Rome’s 1972 doomsday forecast, The Limits to Growth: We were doomed, because too many people would consume too much. Even if our ingenuity bought us some time, we would end up killing the planet and ourselves with pollution. TheContinue Reading

N.C. House and Senate leaders are pursuing distinct plans for education reform. Terry Stoops compares those plans in the next edition of Carolina Journal Radio. Rick Henderson discusses the role politics played in helping to scuttle a proposal to cap and end North Carolina’s renewable energy mandate. You’ll also hear a legislative debate on providingContinue Reading

Barry Smith reports for Carolina Journal Online that the new state school board chairman endorses the opportunity scholarship program included in the N.C. House budget plan. Roy Cordato’s Daily Journal pans Gov. Pat McCrory’s decision to declare June “Solar Energy Month.”

North Carolina’s governor is the latest to make the Amazingly Strong Industry Is Incredibly Weak argument about solar:

Today offers news of a Tea Party on the move in Georgia, land of CWIP and broken dreams. An article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution announces: Tea party targeting Southern Co. power monopoly AJC reports (emphasis added): “It certainly isn’t anything personal, but one of our core values is promoting the free-market system,” said Julianne Thompson,Continue Reading

Duke says: “We have to balance providing affordable, reliable and increasingly clean electricity to our customers, and at the same time provide a return to our shareholders.” So clean energy and Duke shareholders have to get their cuts; captive consumers might as well wake up and smell the monopoly. But don’t you worry, dear ratepayers;Continue Reading

Subsidies stifle innovation, because they shelter the subsidized from the buffeting winds of competition. If you know you’re going to “succeed” no matter what, then even more than the hare in the famous fable, you’re going to fall asleep in the race. The Economist has an article about solar’s increasing cost-competitiveness, which includes an instructiveContinue Reading

The Washington Examiner has a new editorial out on the failures of Europe’s cap and trade system, which begins by noting the impacts here in North Carolina: Logging was dead in North Carolina a few years ago, but it’s booming now with the timber industry hardly able to meet demand. In West Virginia, mining continuesContinue Reading