Comment is NOT Free — Climate Resistance: Challenging Climate Orthodoxy

But Monbiot’s is a shallow, weird, and infantile argument, for which he takes a drubbing in the comments. One of which, from James Heartfield, author of Green Capitalism: Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance, was deleted by the moderators...

Pickens' Windmills Tilt Against Market Realities - WSJ.com

Mr. Pickens's original vision had something for everyone. First he would build a wind farm in Texas with 2,700 turbines costing upward of $10 billion. That would pump power into the national grid, allowing huge amounts of natural gas to be diverted from power plants to newly equipped cars and trucks. The result, he promised, would be a sharp reduction in the country's dependence on Middle East crude.

But the credit crunch gutted the wind project's financing, putting all those turbines on hold. "The wind stuff is deader than hell right now," he concedes.

Morning Bell: Will Chu Let America Power Up? » The Foundry

The rest of the world may talk a good game when it comes to ending their use of carbon based energy, but the reality is a completely different story. While the European Union lectures us on global warming, Germany is busy building 27 coal-fired plants by 2020 and Italy plans to increase its reliance on coal from 14% today to 33% in just five years. In all of Europe, 40 new major coal power plants are set to be built in the next five years. The same realities are dictating behavior in the rest of the world as well. In 2006 alone, China completed enough coal power plants to match all of Britain’s capacity. India plans to boost coal production by 50% by 2012 and quadruple it by 2030. Moving to oil, Brazil, whose beautiful beaches rival or surpass anything in California or Florida, recently discovered a huge underwater oil field and is moving quickly to begin drilling. In Asia, China and Japan were able to put aside centuries of mistrust to come to an agreement on how to drill and share oil in waters in between their countries.

The world’s actions, more than their words, show they understand that economic growth requires plentiful and inexpensive energy. When the Senate questions President-elect Barack Obama’s energy secretary nominee Steven Chu today, they owe it to the American people to find out if Chu understands these realities.