Risks of social unrest growing

Climate change is causing political, economic and social instability exacerbating insecurity for the people of the poorest countries, said representatives and activists of climate vulnerable countries yesterday.

[We hardly knew ye]: Climate change will kill the Nile

Climate change denial is not just a river in Egypt, but now it’s also a river in Egypt; warming-related drought is threatening the Nile and Limpopo rivers.

Before Solyndra, a long history of failed government energy projects - The Washington Post

Solyndra, the solar-panel maker that received more than half a billion dollars in federal loans from the Obama administration only to go bankrupt this fall, isn’t the first dud for U.S. government officials trying to play venture capitalist in the energy industry.

The Clinch River Breeder Reactor. The Synthetic Fuels Corporation. The hydrogen car. Clean coal. These are but a few examples spanning several decades — a graveyard of costly and failed projects.Not a single one of these much-ballyhooed initiatives is producing or saving a drop or a watt or a whiff of energy, but they have managed to burn through far more more taxpayer money than the ill-fated Solyndra.

Renewable Energy: Bubble, Scam, or Both, Part 2 | Power Line

Here’s a quick indicator of how things have gone so badly wrong.  Last year the CEO of Nissan, Carlos Ghosn, who in describing his company’s ambitions for their new small all-electric car, the Leaf, said the following: “We are negotiating with the U.S. government to make sure we have a reasonable return on our investments and continue to develop the technology.”

Wrap your head around that sentence for a moment— “negotiating with the U.S. government to make sure we have a reasonable return on our investments.”  Silly me—I still cling to the old-fashioned, simple-minded view that a reasonable return on investment was determined at the end of the day by the marketplace.  Simple rule: When private industry starts looking to Washington as their primary area to make profits, we’ve made a mess of things.  And the obvious guideline flows from this: research yes—subsidies, no.