Tag: Energy

Fine in Theory: A Rejoinder to Richard Lyon

Lyon had responded to Doshi’s initial review on The Daily Sceptic. Doshi notes Lyon was generous in the exchange, conceding his claim that a $120 barrel is viable if the average is $60 was wrong, withdrawing “not real oil” as interview shorthand, and granting that “the arithmetic is already done” was too strong.

What remains is Lyon’s core: cheap oil is finite, price signals will come too late, so public money must build nuclear early.

Doshi’s reply: “Planning ahead of the market works beautifully in theory. Does it work in practice?”

Satirical illustration contrasting Hubbert peak oil theory with real-world oil projects, permits, protests, and environmental delays.
AI generated by Mata

Lyon had responded to Doshi’s initial review on The Daily Sceptic. Doshi notes Lyon was generous in the exchange, conceding his claim that a $120 barrel is viable if the average is $60 was wrong, withdrawing “not real oil” as interview shorthand, and granting that “the arithmetic is already done” was too strong.

What remains is Lyon’s core: cheap oil is finite, price signals will come too late, so public money must build nuclear early.

Doshi’s reply: “Planning ahead of the market works beautifully in theory. Does it work in practice?”

From Tilak´s Substack

Tilak Doshi

Fine in Theory: A Rejoinder to Richard Lyon

Richard Lyon makes a thoughtful case for preparing early for the end of cheap oil. But every obstacle he names is a government failure, not a market failure – and his remedy is more government.

By Tilak Doshi

Richard Lyon opens his reply to my review of The Energy Trap with the old joke about the senior economist who frowns at a proposal and asks whether something that works in practice also works in theory. It is a good joke, and a generous reply. Lyon concedes that his claim that a $120 barrel is viable if the average is $60 was wrong. He withdraws “not real oil” as interview shorthand. He grants that the book’s line that “the arithmetic is already done” is stronger than he needs. Few authors are so candid in what they are willing to reconsider, a standard that all authors would do well to emulate.

What remains is the heart of Lyon’s case. Cheap oil is running down; the price signal will arrive too late to act on; so governments must start building the replacement now, with public money, as “insurance”. Let me turn his joke around. Planning ahead of the market works beautifully in theory. Does it work in practice?

Physics With Degrees of Freedom

Lyon rests his case on physics. Oil is finite, so once the size of the resource is fixed, the rest is arithmetic. But the arithmetic is only as good as its inputs, and the input that matters most – how much oil will ultimately be recovered – is not a constant of nature. It depends on price, technology and access. A Hubbert curve has degrees of freedom: the assumed ultimate recovery, the shape of the curve, the number of peaks. Change any of them and the date moves, by decades even. Lyon himself concedes that forecasters who counted all oil got their dates wrong.

That uncertainty is where the real decisions are made. When do high prices signal that it is time to invest, and invest in what – deepwater, shale, enhanced recovery, coal conversion, nuclear? If nuclear, which emerging technology – SMRs, molten salt, etc.? These questions fall on those who commit capital: owners betting their own money, or managers with a fiduciary duty to the owners. Being wrong costs them or their shareholders. So they are, rightly, sceptical of anyone who confidently predicts the future from a model and asks them to act on it. Their caution is not myopia. It is the discipline that comes from bearing the cost of error – a discipline no planner faces.

The Far-Sighted Bureaucrat

Lyon’s argument is not new. In the 1980s it was made on behalf of Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), whose patient, far-sighted planning was held up against myopic American investors fixated on quarterly results. Chalmers Johnson’s MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982) hailed Japan as the best example of a state-guided market system.

MITI’s actual record of picking winners is less flattering. In the early 1960s it sought to consolidate the car industry and restrict new entrants; Honda rushed into car-making before the door closed. Its Fifth-Generation Computer project, launched in 1982 to leapfrog the world in artificial intelligence, ended as a commercial failure. Beason and Weinstein found that Japanese industrial targeting between 1955 and 1990 flowed disproportionately to slow-growing sectors.

The problem was not that MITI’s officials were stupid. It was Hayek’s knowledge problem: no ministry can gather the dispersed information that prices convey, and no official bears the losses when the bet goes wrong. Lyon concedes the knowledge problem is real, but says his test is physical, not a planner’s preference: does an investment permanently reduce dependence on hydrocarbons? What does “permanently reduce dependence” actually mean in practice, in decisions made by investors in competing and divergent technologies? Yet somebody must apply that test – decide which projects pass, at what cost, how fast and with whose money. That somebody is a ministry. Public money to build reactors “early” is MITI’s far-sightedness with uranium in place of semiconductors.

Where Is the Market Failure?

A case for public money needs a market failure: a reason why private investors systematically misjudge the future. Lyon’s candidate is timing – a nuclear fleet takes 15 years, a price spike takes a month. But the people with the most to gain from anticipating scarcity are the owners of the oil. As Harold Hotelling showed in 1931, an owner who expects prices to rise faster than the rate of interest leaves oil in the ground. Expected scarcity is priced today, in reserves held back, in futures curves and in asset values. Owners of oil reserves are – or have to be — among the most far-sighted investors in the economy.

Nor is the 15 years a law of physics. Lyon himself agrees that regulation, not physics, explains much of the gap between Korea’s $2,200 per kilowatt and Vogtle’s roughly $10,000 or higher cost. When Washington changed the rules, things moved. Under the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, set up by executive order in May 2025, four privately built test reactors had reached criticality by early July 2026, one of them about 150 days after its project began. These are small test units, not gigawatt plants, but the lesson stands: the timetable is set by the regulator. Lyon has identified a government failure, and the remedy for government failure is not more government.

We can all agree that nuclear power is among the most promising, energy-dense technologies we have. Agreeing on that does not settle how the investment should be made. Will owners and shareholders, weighing their own money against their own judgement of risk, decide the pace and character of nuclear investment – which designs by which companies, where, how fast? Or will planners, who allegedly know when oil and gas will run out, decide for them? A ministry that gets the date wrong loses nothing. Taxpayers and private investors do.

The Hospital and the Diamond

Lyon defends energy return on energy invested (EROI) through what he calls “biophysical economics”: energy contributes far more to output than its share of costs, just as fuel is a small line in a hospital’s budget, yet the hospital stops without it. But this is just another way stating that energy demand is inelastic and the consumer surplus large. The amount we spend on energy – its share of costs – measures energy at the margin. It does not measure how much we depend on it in toto. The gap between what we would pay for the next glass of water rather than go without water altogether – in other words, the diamond-water paradox again – is what economists call the consumer surplus. For an input with no ready substitute – like certain forms of energy – it is very large. A small cost share and a large dependence are entirely consistent. Mainstream economics has no need of a new school to see that. A large consumer surplus does not make energy the only scarce factor of production, which is what EROI implicitly assumes; an energy theory of value makes no more sense than Marx’s labour theory of value. As EROI falls, the price needed to justify a barrel rises, as Lyon notes. Precisely – and that price is what calls forth new supply, efficiency and substitutes.

Prices Damp, Quantities Adjust

Lyon corrects my use of Samuelson’s Le Chatelier principle, citing Milgrom and Roberts: long-run responses exceed short-run ones. That holds for quantities – long-run demand is more elastic than short-run demand. But it implies the opposite of what he needs. Because quantities adjust more over time, prices need adjust less. A supply shock produces a sharp price spike in the short run, which is then damped as producers and consumers respond over the medium and long term. That is dampening feedback, not a runaway spiral.

The hog cycle rests on farmers forecasting tomorrow’s price from today’s. It was in the hog market that John Muth, introducing rational expectations in 1961, showed that producers forecast far better than that. Oil has deep futures markets, and James Hamilton has said shale’s quick response should make future oil shocks smaller. His ten recessions out of eleven followed largely geopolitical disruptions, and other economists blame much of the damage on the Federal Reserve’s reaction. That is politics and monetary policy, not geology.

New Provinces, Old Policies

Lyon says the 1970s cures worked only once: the North Sea and Alaska are long past their peaks. How much of that is policy? Britain imposes a 78 per cent headline tax rate on North Sea producers, and the government has committed to issue no licences to explore new fields. Alaska’s Arctic coastal plain, which the US Geological Survey thinks may hold 4.25 to 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil, was only reopened to leasing in October 2025 in President Trump’s second term focused on “energy dominance”. A province shut by politicians tells us nothing about geology.

Meanwhile new reserves keep appearing. Guyana went from no oil in 2019 to over 900,000 barrels a day in 2026. Brazil’s pre-salt fields, hidden beneath thick salt until seismic imaging improved, now supply 82 per cent of Petrobras’s record output. The Permian Basin, once written off, surpassed its 1973 peak in 2017. Hubbert curves can have second peaks.

Consider, too, how little of the shale resource is being tapped. Shale drillers recover only an estimated 4 to 6 per cent of the oil in place, and the US Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory puts recovery from multi-fractured horizontal wells at under 10 per cent, typically nearer five. More than nine barrels in ten stay in the rock. That is roughly where conventional oil once stood. Primary production from a conventional reservoir typically recovers about 10 per cent of the oil in place; water and gas injection lift that to 20–40 per cent, and tertiary methods to 30–60 per cent or more.

Shale has barely begun that journey. Operators are already experimenting with cyclic gas injection – “huff and puff” – and one Eagle Ford lease showed a 35 per cent improvement in recovery over five cycles. Even modest gains on so large a base would add vast volumes. None of this shows up in a Hubbert curve drawn with today’s technology, because tomorrow’s technology is precisely what such curves leave out.

This puts Höök, Hirsch and Aleklett’s study of giant field declines in perspective. Their study covers individual giant fields, not world supply, and their own data show that decline rates diverged after 1985 because new technology revived giant fields in the Middle East and Russia. Their 2009 warning of a mounting supply challenge was followed by world supply rising to some 106 million barrels a day in 2025.

Nor are oil and gas the only hydrocarbons. It is true that oil cannot again be pushed out of power generation; it has already gone. But the world’s proved coal reserves would last well over a century at current output, and America’s recoverable reserves some four centuries. Coal can be liquefied and gasified to make much of what oil and gas now supply. Sasol’s Secunda complex makes up to 150,000 barrels a day of fuel from coal, and China converted some 276 million tons of coal into oil, gas and chemicals in 2024. Whether cheap nuclear heat or coal conversion or something not yet invented may one day make synthetic hydrocarbons competitive for ships, planes and heavy transport nuclear-made fuels wins is precisely the bet that should be made by those who carry its risk. Not planners with no skin in the game.

Hayek’s Cycle Cuts the Other Way

Lyon enlists Hayek’s theory of the business cycle against shale. But artificially cheap credit distorts investment towards long-gestation, capital-intensive projects. This refers to Hayek’s “roundabout” methods of production – whose value is most sensitive to the rate of interest. Shale is the opposite. A well is drilled and producing within months and, because output falls steeply in the first year, as Lyon himself notes, it yields most of its oil within a few years. A conventional field trapped in a reservoir structure is a different animal: years of exploration, appraisal and construction before first oil, then decades of production. Hamilton notes the very long lag between investment and output in deepwater. Interest rates affected conventional oil far more than unconventional oil.

The bankruptcies of 2020 transferred assets to new owners at a loss to creditors; the oil remained “real” despite the haircuts received by the original owners. Lyon now accepts that shale pays at around $65 a barrel. What best fits Hayek’s description of malinvestment? A 15-year, publicly financed reactor programme – the most interest-sensitive investment of all – justified as insurance against a date nobody can name.

Simon’s Master Resource

Lyon notes that 1980, the base year of the Simon Abundance Index, was a peak year for oil prices, and cites Kiel and colleagues, who found Ehrlich would have won most ten-year bets over the past century. Pooley and Tupy, using time prices and excluding war years, found Simon would have won about 70 per cent of the time. By Lyon’s own figures a barrel cost about five and a half hours of American work in 1980 and about two in 2025. If this is an “energy trap”, it is a comfortable one – as I argued some years ago about the brave new world of ample oil.

Julian Simon called energy the master resource, and Lyon says the condition – cheap energy – carries the whole argument. Agreed. Which is why the real threat to cheap energy is policy that makes it dear: punitive North Sea taxes, drilling bans and nuclear licensing that turns five-year projects into fifteen-year ones. Lyon invokes the Cambridge economic historian Sir Tony Wrigley who showed how coal offered England an escape from the limits of an organic economy of wood, muscle and harvest. But that escape was made by private miners, ironmasters and engineers responding to prices, not by a ministry planning a managed descent.

The Finitude

Lyon and I agree that oil is finite in some ultimate sense (taking technology and human ingenuity into account), that nuclear power deserves a far larger role, and that regulation, not physics, stands in its way. We part company on the remedy. His case for planning rests on a timetable that physics does not fix with certainty and on obstacles that governments created. His cure is to hand the same governments (or their appointed experts) the job of choosing the winners. The history of governments or their experts picking winners is a rather slim one, and Japan’s MITI showed how that tends to work in practice.

Lyon closes by hoping that “preparing early” works in theory as well as in practice. The question is who prepares and on whose behalf? If it means anyone apart from those putting their own or their shareholders’ capital at risk, then beware! Clear the regulatory path, let market prices do their work, let untrammelled investors invest — limited by the usual limits of common law like fraud or externalities — and the “energy trap” may prove, like peak oil before it, a date that keeps receding.

“Energy is Prosperity” (Claire Coutinho speaks to the UK people)

Ed. Note: This manifesto by Claire Coutinho from last year is reprinted in light of the raging UK debate over “Net Zero” policies pursuant to the Climate Change Act of 2008. A former Cabinet member as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, and currently an elected member of the Conservative Pary, she has changed views to trenchantly oppose Net Zero.

Industrial energy landscape at sunset with offshore oil platform, power plant cooling towers, refinery, city skyline, and the text "Energy is Prosperity"
AI generated by Grok

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

Ed. Note: This manifesto by Claire Coutinho from last year is reprinted in light of the raging UK debate over “Net Zero” policies pursuant to the Climate Change Act of 2008. A former Cabinet member as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, and currently an elected member of the Conservative Pary, she has changed views to trenchantly oppose Net Zero.

“I can promise you this. When it comes to energy policy, our priority won’t be ideology, it won’t be vested interests, it won’t be fake promises we can’t deliver. It will be cheap, reliable, abundant energy.”

In the last few decades, we’ve lost sight of a simple truth. Energy is a good thing.

Conservatives know that great eras of British growth and prosperity happen when we have an abundance of cheap, reliable energy. Pitt and Peel who helped to unleash the coal-powered Industrial Revolution. Stanley Baldwin spread electricity across the nation, after the First World War. Mrs Thatcher’s North Sea oil boom got the nation back on its feet after those terrible years of Labour decline.

Today, there is not a single country on earth which has high growth and low energy. That’s because energy is not just part of the economy. It is the economy. It feeds into the costs of every business, every journey, every loaf of bread. That’s why right now, the cost of energy is one of the biggest problems we have. It’s a stealth tax that is making us all poorer. And it’s killing our industry.

Britain has the highest industrial electricity prices in the world. And that has consequences. British industries that use the most energy – like chemicals, glass, and metals – are shutting down week by week. The fibreglass factory in Wigan. The refinery at Grangemouth. Vauxhall in Luton. The North Sea. We’re losing thousands of jobs by the month. And we won’t need any less fibreglass, less gas, or fewer cars – we’ll just import more from abroad, often from countries still powered by coal. Fewer jobs in Britain. Unilateral economic disarmament. For more carbon in the atmosphere.

And this isn’t just about the industries that we already have, the industries of the future need energy too – whether it’s advanced manufacturing or AI. Whether it’s a factory, or a data centre, or a super-lab they will need cheap, reliable energy. And they will go where they find it.

It would be the first time in generations that we would no longer be at the forefront of a technological revolution, and we will be poorer because of it. Those businesses will be created, just not here in Britain. We won’t have saved the planet, we will have failed the next generation. And under Labour this is about to get worse.

Miliband’s Folly

At the last election Ed Miliband promised to cut bills by £300. Keir Starmer promised it. Rachel Reeves promised it. Now last week Ed Miliband had some pretty choice words for Elon Musk about disinformation. So, conference, we’ve got a return message for Ed Miliband. If you want to talk about disinformation, where’s our flipping £300? Far from cutting bills, bills keep going up – and every choice Ed has made is making it worse.

Ed says that building more wind farms will cut bills. But he’s signing up to prices that are the highest in a decade, well above the market price of electricity. Look at this. When he made his promise to cut bills, the price of electricity was £72. That’s that second bar in black you see.

Last year he bought offshore wind at £82, and this year he’s said he’s willing to pay up to £117. Now, that’s before you add in the extra costs for connections, the backup, and the £8 billion we’ll soon be paying wind farms, not to generate any energy, but to turn off when there’s too much wind. And what’s worse, is that he’s extended the wind developer’s contracts to twenty years, locking us into these higher prices for longer.

You can think about it like this. He’s moving our energy onto a fixed-rate mortgage at 10%, because he doesn’t want to be on a 4% variable. Anyone with half a brain can see that won’t cut bills. Now, he says prices are going up because gas is expensive. But that blue bar on the left, £55, that’s gas without taxes. You tell me what’s higher or lower. It’s not hard is it?

He also said that Great British Energy would lead to, and I quote, a “mind-blowing” reduction in bills. But it won’t generate any energy. Only Ed Miliband could launch an £8 billion energy company that won’t produce any energy. Let’s call it what it is. A vanity project that won’t cut bills. So, we will scrap it.

I will give Ed credit for one thing though. He’s managed to do something which is quite difficult, he’s managed to unite the Trade Unions, the Conservative Party, the voters, and Keir Starmer. How? Because they all want the same thing. Turns out they all want him sacked.

And here’s the problem with the Left – they’re infected with a poverty mindset. They believe that Britain has a duty to make itself poorer on the altar of Net Zero. And they think that ordinary people should be the servants of their climate targets.

So, take air conditioning. In America, nearly every single home has air con. Here in Britain? Just 5%. But Sadiq Khan’s London Plan effectively bans air con in all new homes – why? Because it uses too much energy.

Rather than people fitting into the Government’s policy on energy, I believe a Conservative energy policy should serve the needs of the people. Take the North Sea, Ed Miliband’s plans to ban new drilling would make us the only country in the world shutting down our own energy supplies. Up to 200,000 jobs and twelve billion pounds in tax revenue lost.

Why? So that we can import more gas from Norway from the same fields we could drill ourselves. Our imports of liquified gas have soared by over 40 per cent in a single year. Conference, as long as we need gas, as much of it as possible should come from Britain. That’s why we will scrap Ed’s mad ban on new oil and gas licenses, we will reverse the energy profits levy, and we will back the North Sea.

Energy vs. Poverty

We will remember what has been forgotten for too long. Energy is prosperity.

Now, we have to be honest. The poverty mindset has become inseparable from our climate legislation. We shouldn’t have let it sit on the statute book for so long. I wasn’t in Parliament in 2019 when the 2050 Net Zero target was set. But I’ll tell you who was – Kemi Badenoch. She was one of only two people in that entire debate who had the courage to speak up and ask about the costs.

When I came in as Energy Secretary, I started a reset to unpick some of what we got wrong in the face of huge opposition. I started that reset because whilst we have halved our emissions, China has been doing this. Global emissions are rising much, much faster than we can cut them here.

When something clearly isn’t working, we Conservatives should have the courage to tell the truth and say so. Net Zero isn’t working for Britain, and it’s not working for the climate. The British people are no stranger to sacrifice for a just cause. But watching good jobs move abroad is not just. Piling more pain onto people’s bills is not just. And passing down a country that is less secure and less prosperous is not just.

For too many people, Net Zero has become a religion, and for too long we were an unthinking part of the congregation. Here’s the problem with the legislation. We know it’s not working for climate change. But it’s also forcing Ministers to make decisions that make people poorer.

Ed Miliband’s 2008 Climate Change Act sets legally-binding targets. Every five years, targets are drawn up that dictate what products people must buy, and when, and in what quantities, a decade into the future. Conference, we had a name for that back in the 70s, it’s central planning.

If all of our industry shut tomorrow, and we replaced those goods with imports that would be a win for climate targets but a disaster for Britain. If people don’t want a heat pump, the Act requires you to tax or ban them into it.

We are burning wood shipped here from America to produce electricity at three times the cost of gas, and four times the pollution levels of our last coal plant. Why? Because it doesn’t count towards our climate targets.

Those ridiculous prices I just showed you for offshore wind, why would we have to buy any at those prices? You guessed it. Our climate targets.

And here’s the truth, whether it was EU directives, or the Climate Change Committee, or the courts who rule on the activists’ cases, none of them are accountable to the people who will lose their jobs, or people who pay their energy bills, or who need to keep the lights on.

We handed too much control to people who pay no price for being wrong. That was a profound mistake. So, we will set out a new way of doing things. Conference, I know many of you are proud lovers of the environment. I am too. We will not cede that ground. But we will set out new plans under Conservative principles.

Energy Freedom

Our first principle will be to back British innovation. For too long when we talked about innovation, what we meant is that we would force Britain to be the early adopters of technology made in other parts of the world. But look at these charts. Refrigerators, dishwashers, central heating. Here’s the thing, when new tech makes people’s lives better, people will buy it. What we are doing is insisting everyone buys these products before they want to, just to meet a government target. Rather than force our people to be the early adopters, I want us to be the early creators.

The early creators of technology we can export around the world. We’re only 1% of emissions. 99% are happening elsewhere and they’re rising. We clearly have not got this right yet. We have not created all of products we need. But if we can create technologies that others can’t, that will be by far Britain’s biggest contribution to tackling climate change.

Our second principle will be to protect nature. For centuries, environmentalism was the domain of ordinary people – people who were rooted in a sense of place and a love of home. They wanted to protect and cherish the world they loved around them. Roger Scruton called this the “small-scale wisdom of the human heart”. But nature is not Net Zero, in fact some of the time it pulls in the opposite direction. I can think of no better image than this – the Amazon Rainforest being carved up to build a motorway to the latest Climate conference in Brazil.

But what’s worrying is that’s not so dissimilar to what we’re pursuing here. On the left, that tiny dot is the land needed for a nuclear power plant, underneath is what’s needed to get the same amount of energy from wind and solar. Because wind and solar use up to 3,000 times more land. To generate the same amount of power as a nuclear power station, you would need a wind farm the size of the New Forest, or a solar farm the size of the Isle of Wight. On a small island like ours where every inch of countryside is precious, that matters. So instead of carpeting the countryside in wind and solar farms, we will make it easier and cheaper to build dense, reliable, secure, clean nuclear energy.

Repeal the Climate Change Act!

Our third and most important principle will be to prioritise cheap, abundant energy. And we will do that unashamedly. That’s why the next Conservative Government will repeal the Climate Change Act. If a law is not working in the national interest, it is not just possible for us to change it – it’s our duty to do so. All it takes is courage.

Increasing the cost of electricity is the worst possible climate policy too. If you want people to use electric cars, here’s a revolutionary idea. Make electricity cheap. If you want people to use electric heating. Make electricity cheap. If you want to build data centres, to cut bills, to reduce poverty and drive growth. Make electricity cheap.

At the moment Labour’s giving handouts to people to buy electric cars and electric heating at the very same time they’re making electricity unbearably expensive. That’s back to front and we will reverse it. Our priorities will be the priorities of the British people, a strong economy, protecting nature, and cutting bills. So, conference, today I can announce the first policies from our Cheap Power Plan.

First up, the next Conservative Government will axe the Carbon Tax on electricity generation. When Ed Miliband blames gas for high energy bills, what he doesn’t tell you is that over 30% of what we pay for gas power is not to pay for fuel, but to pay for a Carbon Tax that the government chooses to impose.

Now, we know we will need gas to keep the lights on for decades – so it just adds extra costs to our bills for no reason. But here’s the rub – the Carbon Tax inflates the cost of almost all other types of electricity too. So, all the wind and solar farm owners pocket those higher prices as higher profits.

And since the start of the year, guess what Ed has done to Carbon Taxes? That. We warned Ed about doing this. He didn’t listen. Labour’s EU deal increased the Carbon Tax by 70 per cent in the space of 9 months. They did not have to do this. It was a political choice. A political choice that we Conservatives fought against.

Axing the Carbon Tax would cut bills instantly by almost £8 billion a year. Next. We’ll scrap Ed Miliband’s old rip-off wind farm subsidies. Back in 2008, Ed Miliband, in his infinite wisdom, chose to double the subsidies on offer for wind farms. That means when the wind blows, there are wind farms getting up to three times the market price of electricity – and you’re paying for that through your bills. It’s the biggest racket going. We closed the scheme when we were in office, but we’ll go further and say we must scrap those subsidies for good.

Our energy system is not here to prop up the profits of multi-million-pound wind developers at billpayers’ expense. It’s here to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the country.

Together, our policies to Axe the Carbon Tax and scrap Ed’s rip-off wind subsidies would cut people’s electricity bills by 20 per cent. The average family will save £165 a year off their electricity bill. And I realise this sounds less than the promises other parties have made. Ed promised to cut your bills by £300, but we all know that’s a fantasy.

But Reform are just as bad. They’ve promised to cut your electricity bill by £1,000. Do you know how I know that’s garbage? The average bill is only £850. What’s he gonna do, go round writing people cheques?

If you think any politician can promise you electricity for free, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you. They are just as ideological as Labour, it’s just the mirror image. The difference with our policy is that this is real. It’s in the gift of Ministers. This could be done tomorrow. And it would cut your electricity bill by 20%.

So, I can promise you this. When it comes to energy policy, our priority won’t be ideology, it won’t be vested interests, it won’t be fake promises we can’t deliver. It will be cheap, reliable, abundant energy.

Now Conference, being in opposition can be tough. Although I’d like to thank the wider Energy team – Andrew, Malcolm, Nick, Greg, and Bradley for all their excellent work. We know this half-baked tax-and-spend socialism of Labour is a disaster for Britain. When we said in the election, that if you name it, Labour will tax it, we meant it.

Anti-Progress Mentality

There’s a farmer’s tax, a groceries tax, a jobs tax, a jets tax, a lets tax and a bets tax, an oil tax, the soil tax, and a boiler tax. There’s even rumours of a taxi tax! The truth is they would rather tax the pants off this country than get their spending under control.

And it reveals a fundamental belief. If you try to do well for yourself, get a good job, pay for your child’s education, buy a house, start a successful business – they don’t celebrate you. They sneer at you. They want to redistribute away your success. They talk about poverty like they care. But their policies are making energy, food, childcare and housing more expensive. And their answer is always more redistribution rather than confronting the truth that this Government is choosing, choosing to raise the cost of almost every basic good.

Now, Reform I’m afraid to say have the economic policies of Jeremy Corbyn. They’re promising nationalisations we can’t afford, more tax for more welfare, more spending, which means more borrowing, which means more debt for our children. If Government is here to serve the liberties of the people, that means allowing them to keep more of the money that they earn.

Now Conference, we know growth is the biggest challenge we face. But growth is not created by Government subsidies. It is created by millions of people. And I worry, our system as it stands is teaching people to be less capable than they are. We cannot survive if our culture becomes a competition of victimhood.

The risk is people start to ask themselves, not what can I do, but why bother at all? Every person who takes on more hours, comes up with bright ideas, take risks, saves and invests in their future and their family’s future. Personal agency. The sense that you can take control of your life and reap the rewards of your efforts. That’s the real engine of growth.

Everything we do as a Party will be in their interests. And we will start by giving them cheaper energy.

Thank you.

AI: Peak Demand and Peak Supply Postponed (fossil future)

“Absent [climate] policy steering [intervention], AI’s modeled effects increase the carbon intensity of the global economy and reinforce fossil fuel incumbency—outcomes that current analytical and governance frameworks do not fully capture.”

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“Absent [climate] policy steering [intervention], AI’s modeled effects increase the carbon intensity of the global economy and reinforce fossil fuel incumbency—outcomes that current analytical and governance frameworks do not fully capture.” (Nature Portfolio, below)

Age-old fears of declining fossil fuel supply and falling demand have, once again, been upended by the engines of progress. The anti-CO2 crusade, futile and wasteful, has been set back again. Tsvetana Paraskova’s “AI Could Make Big Oil Even Bigger” (OilPrice.com: August 18, 2026) gives the supply-side story:

AI could strengthen fossil fuels, with oil and gas productivity gains potentially outweighing emissions savings from renewables.

  • AI could create nearly $500 billion in value for E&P companies by 2030 through lower costs and higher production.
  • Exxon and Chevron are already deploying AI in exploration, potentially uncovering new drilling opportunities and accelerating development.

“Arguably, a fundamental change in the energy system may not come from surging power demand,” she writes, “but from the efficiencies and productivity gains AI will help energy companies achieve, according to a new paper published in the journal npj Climate Action by co-authors, some of whom have worked for Microsoft and its sustainability initiatives.” (“npj” stands for “Nature Partner Journal.”)

The abstract of “AI-driven Productivity Gains Enable More CO₂ Emissions than They Avoid in a Global Energy–economy Model” (Nature Portfolio: August 5, 2026) follows:

The net climate impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) depend largely on how its applications propagate through competing energy pathways. Predominant analyses examine the relationship between datacenter energy demand, renewables optimization, and demand-side efficiencies, but insufficiently address how AI also reshapes fossil fuel supply economics.

We instead model AI as a bidirectional productivity amplifier in a global computable general equilibrium model, quantifying both enabled emissions from fossil fuel productivity gains and avoided emissions from renewables productivity gains. Under parallel adoption scenarios, net annual CO₂ emissions increase by 0.47–1.8 gigatonnes (1.2–4.8% of 2024 global energy-related CO₂ emissions).

Enabled emissions exceed avoided emissions whenever fossil-sector gains are nonzero; net emissions reductions require renewables gains 4–5× greater than fossil fuel gains. Absent policy steering, AI’s modeled effects increase the carbon intensity of the global economy and reinforce fossil fuel incumbency—outcomes that current analytical and governance frameworks do not fully capture.

Solar for the soul or for the senses

The Sun has mystified mankind for centuries. In days long gone, primitive people worshiped the Sun or a Sun God. But much more recently, in the later 1800s, people were still mystified because by then science had advanced a great deal and physicists had acquired a significant understanding of thermodynamics and energy. They knew that thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and it can only be converted to another form. They also knew how to calculate the heat emitted from burning coal, wood, or anything else.

Aerial top down of solar panels-Photovoltaic plant field

From CFACT

By Kelvin Kemm

The Sun has mystified mankind for centuries. In days long gone, primitive people worshiped the Sun or a Sun God. But much more recently, in the later 1800s, people were still mystified because by then science had advanced a great deal and physicists had acquired a significant understanding of thermodynamics and energy. They knew that thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and it can only be converted to another form. They also knew how to calculate the heat emitted from burning coal, wood, or anything else.

Astronomers and physicists had also come to the realization that the Sun was billions of years old and appeared to be going strong for a few billion more.

The physics calculations of the time showed that the Sun should be impossible.

The calculations showed that the Sun could not possibly have burned for millions of years, let alone billions, and that it was destined to burn out soon.

But mysteriously, it was doing just fine. The year 1900 arrived, and five years later, some young upstart physicist started to say crazy impossible-sounding things. He made wild claims. His name was Albert Einstein.

He came up with a crazy equation; E= mc2. This said that energy obtained (E) was equal to the mass of anything (m) multiplied by the speed of light squared (c2). This comes out at a huge number. In fact, it tells you that something like an ordinary household brick, if converted to energy, would drive a large ship around the world over 100 times.

The equation applied to nuclear power. It said that you could turn atoms into energy, that is heat and light. This equation appeared to contradict the laws of thermodynamics.

Using that equation showed that the Sun was not burning stuff like coal, it was turning its own atoms into energy. It was a giant nuclear reactor.

Finally, physicists could explain the age of the Sun.

A few years later, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize… he got it for explaining how solar panels worked. That was something he sort of did in his spare time, when he was not figuring out how the Sun stayed alive.

So, all the solar power arriving at the Earth is actually nuclear power, from a giant nuclear reactor.

When the Sun’s rays arrive at the Earth’s surface, it is possible to get about 20% of it to turn into electricity. At lunchtime, the Sun’s rays are about one kilowatt per square meter.

Any energy which makes engineering and financial sense should be used. So, we should use solar power, but its use must be governed by sense and reality, not by fantasy and dreams.

That means real economics employing real engineering.

You only get solar power when the Sun shines. Furthermore, you only get the maximum when the Sun is directly overhead. Before morning teatime and after afternoon teatime, you only get about half because the sunlight is coming in at a steep angle. Therefore, much less falls on the square meter. Try this with a flashlight on the lounge wall.

So, the best thing to do with solar power is to use it where it is appropriate and for an appropriate purpose. What people need to do is to find usage patterns which match the natural solar patterns. Alternatively, use solar in remote locations in which it would be impractical to run electric cables from any other source. For example, power a radio repeater station which is far out in a remote area, or open and close an electric farm gate.

Those are low current requirements yet are most valuable applications.

So let us look at higher current applications. How about pumping water into storage tanks on a farm or industrial site? In such an application it is not necessary to pump all day, so it is fine if the pumps only work when the Sun is shining.

Let me propose another idea, a company manufacturing wooden furniture. Let us assume that it is run using only solar power. In the morning, the workforce comes in and measures up the wood, draws pencil lines. I have to start at some point in the cycle. Then after morning teatime, as the Sun climbs in the sky, they start to use cutting and drilling machines which need electricity. This goes on with shaping and sanding until around afternoon teatime. Then, they stop the machines and start to glue and screw all the prepared parts together. Then, there is varnishing, painting, and adding the metal handles and locks. Meanwhile, they have charged a small battery bank. They go home. The next morning when they arrive at work, the battery will supply electricity for some lighting, computers, and tea and coffee. So the cycle goes.

Unfortunately, politics and fantasy have intruded into solar power to such a degree that people are trying to force solar power to perform functions for which it is not suited. You cannot run an electric train on solar. You can’t drive a steel foundry on solar. You can’t risk open-heart surgery in a theatre run entirely by solar, nor can you run a mine.

The large solar arrays that we are seeing are there because politics is telling you that they will ‘save the planet,’ but in fact, they are quite dangerous to an electricity grid. That is because they can create huge instability into a system, resulting in a crash. That is what happened in Spain recently. Huge solar arrays also create a significant system-management problem. For a system controller, it is obviously far more difficult to try to manage hugely varying amounts than it is to manage a far more continuous, reliable source of supply.

I am all in favor of using solar, but don’t force it to perform functions for which it is clearly not suited. At the end of the day, excuse the pun, it is the consumer who pays for all the mismatches.

Introducing the UK Subsidy Clock

The numbers are public. Every one of them. They sit on the data portals of the LCCC, Elexon, NESO, Ofgem, HMRC and DESNZ, in the formats those bodies happen to prefer, on the cadences they happen to publish, under the names they happen to use. What does not exist – anywhere – is the sum. No department adds them up. No minister is ever handed the total and asked to defend it.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Richard Lyons

FOR SOME YEARS NOW, David Turver has been doing a job that properly belongs to the state. Month after month, on his Eigen Values Substack, he takes the published settlement data and reconstructs what the energy transition actually costs us: the Feed-in Tariffs, the hidden network and balancing charges, the subsidies that never quite make it into the headline figure. Forensic, sourced and relentless. He does by hand, one careful article at a time, what no government department appears willing to total in public.

I have leaned on his work for years. This piece is partly to say so.

And partly to make a confession. Reading Turver, the thought that kept returning was not how much – it was why is this so hard to find out? The numbers are public. Every one of them. They sit on the data portals of the LCCC, Elexon, NESO, Ofgem, HMRC and DESNZ, in the formats those bodies happen to prefer, on the cadences they happen to publish, under the names they happen to use. What does not exist – anywhere – is the sum. No department adds them up. No minister is ever handed the total and asked to defend it.

After a while you stop believing that is an accident.

This is the seventh point of the blueprint at the end of my forthcoming book The Energy Trap. The United Kingdom audits its money. The Office for Budget Responsibility marks every Budget against reality, and no Chancellor escapes its arithmetic. There is no equivalent for energy – the physical claim, and the financial one, behind every pound. There should be. Until there is, the cost of the largest peacetime industrial programme in the country’s history remains a thing the public is invited to feel strongly about and forbidden, by sheer scatter, from actually counting.

I do not think a minister is going to fix this. Opacity is not a bug they have failed to patch; it is the working condition of the policy. A number nobody adds up is a number nobody has to answer for. If the total is to exist, we are going to have to build it ourselves.

So I did. It is at subsidyclock.co.uk, and it has been running since I switched it on.

Here is what it does.

At the top is a live counter: the subsidies paid to British renewable and low-carbon generators since 2002, in pounds, ticking forward as the settlement data lands. It is past £100 billion in direct payments alone. Add the costs that reach you less visibly – through taxation, and through the network, balancing and carbon charges loaded onto every unit you buy – and the figure passes £200 billion.

Under the headline, the parts. Every figure splits into two layers that are never invisibly blended. There are direct subsidies, which are measured: Contracts for Difference, the Renewables Obligation, Feed-in Tariffs and wind constraint payments – money traceable to named generators in official settlement data. And there are indirect costs, which are estimated: the Capacity Market, the carbon taxes, the transmission and balancing charges that the settlement data does not pin to any one generator. Each estimate carries a published attribution rule and is labelled as an estimate. Where a figure combines the two, it says so. The measured headline is never quietly inflated with the guesses. That distinction is the whole discipline of the thing.

Then it lets you look. You can see where the money lands – the largest recipients grouped into the physical power stations they belong to, plotted on a map of Great Britain, each bubble sized by what it has been paid. You can see the cost over time, in today’s money and in the pounds of the day, and as a share of the electricity bill. And you can take the lot: every series downloads as a CSV, free to reuse, so anyone who wants to check me – or argue with me – starts from the same numbers I did.

None of it asks to be believed. Every retrieved data point links back to its source URL, the moment it was fetched, and a hash of what was fetched. The methodology page sets out each scheme, its source, and how confident I am in the attribution. The raw data is committed in full, so every published figure reproduces from scratch with no faith required. I would rather hand you the working than ask for your trust.

I won’t pretend it was easy to assemble. It was not. The data is strewn across half a dozen bodies in incompatible shapes, some of it annual, some daily, some buried inside indirect charges that take real work to disentangle without double-counting. That difficulty is not incidental. It is the moat. A cost spread thinly enough across enough schemes stops looking like a cost at all, which is a convenient property for a policy whose total nobody wishes to defend.

Which brings me to the part I care most about. The clock is built to be audited, not admired. If you find an error in a published figure, tell me – there is a corrections page and an issue form, and confirmed errors are fixed and logged in public, in the open, dated. Nothing is ever silently edited. When an official source revises its own history, that is logged too, alongside the old version, never over it. The point of radical transparency is that it has to survive being checked by people who would dearly love to catch it out. So check it.

A last word on Turver, because the debt is concrete as well as moral. The station groupings, the per-station Renewables Obligation allocation and the transmission-charge series all rest on datasets he compiled, each traced through to its primary source and cited on the site. Eigen Values is the kind of patient, unglamorous, properly referenced work this whole argument depends on, and you should read him. What the clock tries to add is reach: to take the arithmetic he and others have done the hard way and put it behind a single live figure that anyone can send to anyone, in one link, and that nobody can wave away as a vibe.

The numbers were always public. They were simply never added together, because added together they ask a question. The meter is running while you read this. Go and watch it, and decide for yourself whose figures to trust.

And then do three things. A number nobody adds up is a number nobody answers for – so the job now is to make this one impossible to ignore.

  1. Send it. Copy subsidyclock.co.uk and put it where the cost of energy is being discussed. Forward it to one person who would find it clarifying. Post it. Paste it into the comments under the next ‘bills are falling’ announcement. One link, no caveats, no login – that is the whole design.
  2. Use the number – there’s a kit for it. I have put everything you need on one page: subsidyclock.co.uk/share. It holds ready-made image cards, sized for a post and refreshed every day, so whatever you grab is always carrying the latest figure. Hit Download to save one, or Copy image to paste it straight into a post, an email or a thread. Run a website or a newsletter? There is a one-line snippet on the same page that drops the live counter onto any page as a self-contained widget. The next time someone tells you renewables are cheap, you reply with a current, sourced figure and a picture to go with it. All free to republish – just credit the clock.
  3. Check it, and subscribe. Try to catch it out. If you find an error, file it – confirmed mistakes are fixed in public, with your name on the correction if you want it. And subscribe here, so you don’t miss what the numbers turn up next: who is being paid, what the latest contracts lock in, and where the bill is heading.

That is how a thing the government totals nowhere becomes a thing everyone has seen.

This article was first published on Richard Lyons’s Substack The State of Britain. You can subscribe here. His book, The Energy Trap: Why the Renewable Energy Transition Can’t Work – and What Can is published in September.

Everyone Wants Affordable Energy. Nobody Wants to Cut the Ribbon.

Northeastern states are scrambling to address rising energy costs. New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and others are even considering abandoning some of their most restrictive Green New Deal-style emissions policies to increase the supply of affordable sources.

From The CO2 Coalition

By Gordon Tomb

Northeastern states are scrambling to address rising energy costs. New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and others are even considering abandoning some of their most restrictive Green New Deal-style emissions policies to increase the supply of affordable sources.

Such new energy projects are among the most difficult endeavors to bring to fruition. Requiring massive investments and at least a modicum of public support, they have no chance of becoming reality without people of influence standing for their success.

Take the proposed Constitution Pipeline for instance. The benefits of this 125-mile-long pipeline, which would deliver Pennsylvania natural gas to energy-starved New York and New England, are so numerous, one might wonder why it hasn’t already been built. Except that the project is among many such enterprises that have languished in a regulatory morass fueled by anti-development activists and nurtured by incompetent political leadership.

Yet, new life is stirring for this much-needed supply line. Having first proposed the project in 2013, Williams Companies, a Tulsa-based firm, received federal approvals more than a decade ago. In 2016, the company sidelined the project after New York regulators denied a water-quality permit.

Earlier this year, Williams resubmitted applications to regulators, projecting the pipeline to be in service by early 2028. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has received more than 600 comments since January as part of its review.

“The need for this project is well documented,” said Jim Welty, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, in comments to FERC. “Customers throughout New York and New England have experienced significant supply disruptions in recent years due to inadequate natural gas supply and constrained access to the market.”

New England has “resorted to importing natural gas from foreign nations, located thousands of miles away because a more efficient … manner to connect to domestically produced natural gas currently does not exist,” noted Welty.

Connecticut State Sen. Ryan Fazio, a Republican, said Constitution would mitigate New England’s high gas prices, saving customers up to $8.5 billion over the project’s life.

“Historically, peak winter gas prices in the region have averaged at least 2.5 times the national benchmark, and daily price fluctuations can reach up to 30 times the average annual levels due to (pipeline) capacity limitations,” he said.

The 30-inch-diameter pipeline would run from gas fields in northeast Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna County to upstate New York. Connecting with the Iroquois and Tennessee interstate systems, Constitution would deliver enough gas for 3 million homes, or about three percent of Pennsylvania’s current production.

Williams estimates that construction will create 2,500 jobs, generating nearly $300 million in direct labor income and almost $1 billion in total economic output.

Producers of natural gas have long struggled with a lack of pipelines to match production capacity and market needs. The Marcellus region “is by far the most prolific natural gas production area in the U.S., accounting for about one-third of the nation’s daily output,” notes Housley Carr, an energy writer and analyst for RBN Energy.

“The shale play experienced phenomenal growth in the 2010s, its gas production rising [by a factor of 16],” writes Carr. “But the pace of growth has slowed dramatically in recent years, mostly due to takeaway constraints.”

Refusing the construction of the Constitution Pipeline is “absolute insanity,” says Mike Sommers, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute.

In the Texas Permian Basin, where natural gas is a byproduct of oil-well drilling, the price of gas sometimes is driven so low by the pipeline shortage that producers must pay to have it taken away.

Electricity prices in New England are 55 percent higher than Pennsylvania’s thanks to limited access to natural gas. However, affordability issues are softening northeast governors who have long opposed pipelines.

This April, Bloomberg Law reported that Williams CEO Chad Zamarin had received support for Constitution in meetings with all New England governors. In neighboring New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul moderated positions on energy projects last year as her election campaign got underway.

Following his pattern of avoiding controversial issues, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has said nothing publicly about the Constitution Pipeline, even though natural gas represents arguably the Keystone State’s most promising industry.

In fact, of the hundreds who submitted comments to FERC, those identifying as state politicians were only the Connecticut state senator and 13 Republican members of the New York State Legislature, whose joint statement supported the pipeline. Bloomberg’s report of New England gubernatorial support notwithstanding, a search of public statements favoring Constitution turned up just one—from New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte.

Leadership matters in developing energy projects. Following the 2025 inauguration of the President Donald Trump, five pipeline projects, including Constitution, were revived in the Northeast, after years of being stalled by political hostility, according to an S&P Global analysis. Outside the region, 10 projects received federal or state approvals.

With due acknowledgment to those openly backing the Constitution Pipeline, surely a project benefiting most of the Northeast deserves stronger support. Frankly, small town America displays more enthusiasm for the ribbon cuttings of ice cream shops than have leaders of states promised the bounty of affordable energy and a thriving gas industry.

Originally published at The American Spectator, June 8, 2026.

Gordon Tomb is a senior advisor for the CO2 Coalition and a senior fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation, a Pennsylvania free-market think tank.

What it Really Takes to Meet the Materialistic Demands of the Modern

Electricity demands are growing worldwide, and the unpopular questions around what it truly takes to power our modern society beyond JUST electricity, are energy literacy conversations that provoke critical thought.

From The CO2 Coalition

By Ronald Stein and Lars Schernikau

Electricity demands are growing worldwide, and the unpopular questions around what it truly takes to power our modern society beyond JUST electricity, are energy literacy conversations that provoke critical thought.

Conversation encourages young minds to challenge assumptions, ask difficult questions, and resist accepting simplistic answers to deeply complex challenges.

It is our responsibility as parents, educators and leaders, not to hand children finished conclusions, but to help them build the confidence and discipline to think independently, question rigorously, and shape better outcomes than the generations before them.

Wind turbines and solar panels ONLY generate electricity but CANNOT produce any of over 6,000 products or transportation fuels required to sustain life as we know it. Even the electricity they generate cannot be fed into the grid without “conditioning” to match required frequency, current, voltage, and phase. They lack physical inertia and are “digital power” generators.

The world is not dependent on natural fossil fuels, as one does not use “raw” crude oil that is only black tar, BUT has become dependent on the products and transportation fuels PRODUCED FROM oil, coal or gas, the same products and fuels that wind or solar CANNOT provide!

Transportation fuel demands continue to grow to support jet fuel for planes, bunker fuel for ships, diesel fuel for trucks, and gasoline fuel for cars. The fact that the products and transportation fuels MADE FROM crude oil, sustains 10 times more people in the world today (over 8 billion) than at the start of the Industrial Revolution (approximately 700 to 800 million people in 1750) is often overlooked.

Discussing oil alone, consultants, educators, politicians, and also many industrial leaders too often CANNOT explain how the more than 350,000 wind turbines, and an estimated 3.5 to 5 billion individual solar panels in the world will produce the following transportation fuels:

  • Bunker fuel, to support over 112,500 commercial and merchant ships globally (measuring at least 100 gross tons). Of this total, about 60,300 large, oceangoing vessels (over 1,000 gross tons) dedicated to international cargo transport, including bulk carriers, oil tankers, and container ships.
  • Jet fuel to support an estimated 30,000 commercial aircraft in the world. When including private/general aviation, military, and cargo planes, that total climbs to over 500,000 aircraft worldwide. Globally, nearly 100,000 commercial flights take off and land every single day. At any given moment, there are roughly 12,000 to 15,000 planes in the air across the globe
  • Gasoline fuel: Worldwide gasoline consumption hovers around 25 to 27 million barrels per day (over 300 billion gallons annually). Driven heavily by passenger transportation and light-duty vehicles, this demand accounts for a massive chunk of global petroleum usage, with North America and Asia-Pacific leading the consumption charts
  • Diesel fuel: Global diesel usage is approaching 400 billion gallons annually, accounting for roughly 32% of all liquid fuel consumption. Driven by the freight, agriculture, and construction sectors, it remains the primary energy source for over 60% of worldwide freight transport.

Today, the 8+ billion people on this planet enjoy more than 6,000 products in our daily materialistic lives that did not exist before the 1800’s and that are meeting the supply chain demands of today’s hospitals, airports, telecommunications, appliances, electronics, sanitation systems, heating and ventilating systems to support current lifestyles.

On the other hand, nuclear generated power would lower costs and emissions, provide continuous and uninterruptable electricity, and utilize the least amount of earth resources, and have the smallest requirement for land usage.

A lesser considered fact is that electricity came AFTER oil and coal, as ALL electrical generation methods from hydro, coal, natural gas, nuclear, and wind, and solar are ALL built with the products, components, and equipment that are made from oil, coal, and gas derivatives.

  • Without crude oil, coal or gas there still can be no electricity because the electricity generating machines could not exist!
  • Electricity can charge an iPhone, but neither wind turbines nor solar panels can PRODUCE an iPhone,

Because the next generation is inheriting an exciting world facing enormous decisions, not just about energy, but about prosperity, inequality, technology, sustainability, and societal and political stability:

  • They need more than just slogans
  • They need critical thinking skills
  • They need intellectual courage and support
  • And above all they should expect better answers than “because that is what everyone says”

If a conversation about energy literacy can spark a student to ask:

  • What evidence supports this?
  • What are the trade-offs?
  • Who benefits and who pays?
  • What are we not being told?
  • Is there an alternative solution delivering better results?

Then, the discussions and conversations about energy literacy have achieved far more than just sharing information.

Please share this information with teachers, students, and friends to encourage Energy Literacy conversations at the family dinner table.

Click this Link to Sign up for Energy Literacy from Ronald Stein

Originally published at America Out Loud, June 8, 2026.

Ronald Stein, P.E., is a CO2 Coalition member, engineer, columnist on energy literacy at America Out Loud NEWS, and advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations.” He is also the recipient of an unsolicited Tribute to Ronald Stein from Stephen Heins.

Dr. Lars Schernikau is a CO2 Coalition member and has more than two decades of experience in the global energy and commodities industry. Co-founder, shareholder, and former supervisory board member of HMS Bergbau AG and IchorCoal NV—international commodity marketing and mining companies. Lars is an international speaker and has authored several books, including “The Unpopular Truth… About Electricity and the Future of Energy.”

Energy security is critical … for coffee and heart surgery

The Russian incursion into Ukraine and all the current drama in the Middle East have focused attention on the question of energy security. So, what is energy security? If you get up at 2 am feeling restless and you want to make yourself a cup of coffee, you switch the kitchen light on, then flick the switch of the coffee maker. Both switches should work immediately. That is energy security for you.

From CFACT

By Kelvin Kemm

The Russian incursion into Ukraine and all the current drama in the Middle East have focused attention on the question of energy security. So, what is energy security? If you get up at 2 am feeling restless and you want to make yourself a cup of coffee, you switch the kitchen light on, then flick the switch of the coffee maker. Both switches should work immediately. That is energy security for you. You always want to be certain that your switches work when you need them. Your monthly electricity bill includes a component which accounts for this security. The electricity utility guarantees you a good 24/7 service, so they integrate systems to ensure that the electricity always flows.

If your home electricity does not flow, you don’t get your coffee. You can survive that. But what if you are undergoing open-heart surgery and the electricity to the operating theatre stops? We can go on ‘up the line’ and ask – what if electricity to the entire city stops?

The human body relies on your blood flowing all the time. On the outward journey, it carries oxygen and energy. The energy is in the form of the nutrients that your cells need. Your heart also needs to pump to keep it all moving. The heart is supplied by your blood flow.

On the return journey, the blood is the refuse-removal system. That flow is critical too and also needs the heart pumping. If this whole circuit stops, or slows down, you are in great trouble.

The same is true of the electricity distribution system of a city, a state, or the whole country.

At this point, let me point out that energy is not only electricity, but also includes fossil fuels such as oil and gas. Oil derivatives not only fuel motor cars, but they also provide many chemicals critical to daily life.

Imagine if your next-door neighbor, or someone you hardly knew, controlled an on/off switch to your blood flow. Not very reassuring, is it?

So, take a moment to consider who holds an on/off switch to your flow of electricity and oil.

A number of members of the European Union found this out the hard way when Russian gas stopped flowing. Many countries in the world are finding out right now what happens when flows of Middle Eastern oil get restricted.

There are cartoons going the rounds of people being harnessed to taxis like horses to carts or, putting the cart before the horse, so to speak, pushing cars around. These are jokes, but it is no joke when the food supply dwindles because the farmer’s tractor can’t run and the grain-milling machines stop working because the electricity has stopped. So, it is imperative to ensure a supply of baseload electricity. Inherently included in baseload power is a security factor. Solar and wind power don’t have that. You only get solar when the sun shines and wind when the wind decides to blow … at the correct speed. Additionally, wind must not blow too hard, or the wind turbine has to put its brakes on to stop it damaging itself.

OK, OK, some people say. Just install storage, which means batteries. But if you do that, you have to add more solar and wind to charge the batteries. The surplus solar and wind produced under variable optimal conditions will not be enough. So, you have to build more variable solar and wind. Then what happens is that it rains for a week. So the solar output drops right down, and the wind falls off too. The result … the energy system gets a heart attack. It is extremely difficult and expensive to build energy security into a wind or solar supply.

Energy security means: peace of mind for all citizens.

It is necessary to look at energy security on a city level, state level, and national level. On a national level, one has to worry about the Middle East, and EU countries have to worry about Ukraine.

One clear solution for city and state levels is to introduce nuclear power. This should be a mixture of large nuclear reactors and the new Small Modular Reactors. The huge advantage of SMRs is that you can spread them around. They are small enough to power a district, a mine, or industrial grouping.

A really important point is that nuclear fuel lasts for three years in the nuclear reactor. Therefore, there is no need to worry about the continuous flow of fuel, which is such a problem with oil and gas.

The recent international political upheavals have vividly shown the importance of energy security. If you want to guarantee your 2 am coffee, then city, state, and industrial planners need to now have the wisdom to plan for the integration of systems such as SMRs, so that you keep the political control of your own on/off switch very close to home.

‘Climate Hushing’: Pragmatism Demoting Exaggeration (McKibben fools himself)

Climate messaging is a mess as the Progressive Left tries to square the energy circle with affordability.

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“There’s a thing out there called a ‘climate husher.’ Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called ‘climate hushers’ – people who think Dems should stop talking about climate.” – Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)

Climate messaging is a mess as the Progressive Left tries to square the energy circle with affordability. Traditional messages have flunked. Complained one activist:

Maybe the problem isn’t climate denial. Maybe it’s climate messaging. We’ve been attempting to scare or shame people into caring, and it’s not effective. Is it time to completely rethink how we talk about climate and sustainability? We’ve spent years trying to influence people through fear, data, and moral urgency. The results? Mixed.

The latest despair comes from Bill McKibben in his Earth Day post, Let’s TALK Climate. “The so-called ‘climate hushing’ among Democrats is a product of political consultants looking at polling data,” he complained. McKibben then quotes from Claire Barber’s essay, which summarized a report by Searchlight Institute (a Democratic think tank), “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change: Don’t Say Climate Change.”

“While battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem, addressing it is not a priority for them,” the report said. Similar to the American Mind Survey, Searchlight found that a majority of Americans believe that climate change is a problem, but rank it below other key issues, like affordability. Searchlight also found high partisan (Democratic) association with the terms “climate” and “climate change” and suggested jettisoning mentions of both altogether.

McKibben then provides some context:

The phenomenon really dates, I think, from the 2024 presidential campaign, and Kamala Harris’s abbreviated run for the White House. Climate campaigners were perfectly happy to shut up during that run for an obvious reason: Joe Biden had given them, in the Inflation Reduction Act [IRA], most of what DC could provide: a massive infusion of funds for the energy transition we require.

The job was to pull Harris across the finish line so that her administration could continue the work well underway with the IRA. We failed at that: her message, on the politics of joy and the dangers of Trump ran aground on frustrations with inflation. Climate played no discernible part in the election…..

Wimp-out. Climate and energy were an issue to Republicans, independents, and libertarians, along with the overreach of the Democrat Party elsewhere. The IRA, notably, was an attempt to create too-big-to-fail, rent-seeking wind, solar, battery, and EV businesses. That horrendous bill threw deficit dollars at the worst energies, pure misdirection and waste that is now being undone by a new administration.

Back to McKibben:

In the wake of their defeat, Democrats have seized on “bread and butter issues,” and left supposed culture war clashes behind. That’s come at a real cost. Corporations, feeling only pressure from the right, have backslid dramatically on their climate commitments. (The big tech guys, who just a couple of years ago were noisily pledging they’d go net zero, are currently planning gas-fired data centers that Wired reports today will produce more emissions than mid-sized European countries). And journalists are, not surprisingly, wandering away from the whole area: the wonderful Amy Westervelt yesterday described a dour meeting of environmental reporters where, among other things, she learned that not just the Washington Post but also Reuters was laying off its climate desk.

Good news, right? The hyperbole and strongarming for bad over good, exaggeration over realism, encouraged at the federal level by a new Administration, was removed. Amway-eyed McKibben can see only red instead of green (as in less wind/solar/battery blight/sprawl).

Meanwhile, funders of climate journalism are largely folding, too, opting to back comms projects instead or simply stay away from anything as “controversial” as climate and journalism altogether. The cowardice is breathtaking.

McKibben quotes from the “media watchdogs” FAIR:

Our research has found that online news coverage of climate change has been trending down. A search of the term “climate change” in Media Cloud’s US–National dataset, which indexes 248 online outlets, found that there was almost 32% less climate coverage in 2025 than 2024. This trend is similar in TV news. A recent Media Matters (3/4/26) study found that climate coverage on major US commercial broadcast TV networks was down 35% in 2025….

McKibben fools himself, something that Richard Feynman warned against decades ago.

What’s interesting about all this is that it’s not being driven by some change in the basic underlying politics of climate [wrong]. New polling data makes clear that Americans are as concerned about climate change as they ever have been [wrong].

Polls? Ask the question in terms of priorities or in terms of monetary sacrifice. Sure, it is easy to want a freebie to make X or Y better. But consider the reality that climate change and the environment are way back of, yes, bread-and-butter issues.

“Americans’ assessments of the environment are particularly bleak ahead of Earth Day,” McKibben continues, “as a record-low 35% offer a positive rating of the environment’s quality and two-thirds say it is worsening.” But that is largely from exaggeration from a political takeover of natural/social science around the issue. The neo-Malthusian consensus has been wrong since at least the 1960s on a variety of related issues. Bottom line: people are not the problem, they are the solution. Julian Simon lives in death. Paul Ehrlich is intellectually dead in death.

McKibben advises what the Republicans would like to see happen.

The key data point here, for political thinkers, is that the increase in worry about the environment is being driven by independent voters, precisely the people who will determine how the midterms go.

I doubt it. The Green New Deal Scam is exposed. “Climate” is code for energy inferiority, don’t eat meat, and don’t be temperature-comfortable indoors. Self-sacrifice, in other words, is a nonstarter from the U.S. to France. McKibben’s alarmism is just too tired and old. [1] Time’s up: Get real or get out.

———————–

[1] McKibben ends on his regular alarmist note:

So, especially as the climate disasters of this hot summer start to mount, and as the El Niño [a natural phenomenon?] starts to scare people anew, I’d spend some time if I were campaigning making fun of the president on this score….

… with a killer fallacy and magical thinking on stilts:

I’d couple [the pitch] with a full-on assault about affordability…. a quick move to clean energy drives down prices. If I were preparing ads for congresspeople, I’d definitely have one about how a solarized Australia will, in June, start providing electricity free for three hours every afternoon to all its citizens. Talk about affordability!

Let’s Get on with Building More New Coal Plants

New modern coal plants are needed for energy security, grid reliability, affordable electricity generation and without pollution, so let me explain some of the details of the equipment used to clean the flue gases and the progress made in cleaning the air since 1970.

From The CO2 Coalition

Progress in Clean Coal Combustion Is a Remarkable Achievement, So Let’s Get on with Building More New Coal Plants

By Richard Storm

New modern coal plants are needed for energy security, grid reliability, affordable electricity generation and without pollution, so let me explain some of the details of the equipment used to clean the flue gases and the progress made in cleaning the air since 1970.

Short History of Air Pollution Control

The EPA was started in 1970, for good reasons of cleaning the air and water. Coal plants built before 1970 had no controls on sulfur emissions and particulate collection was only between 75 and 90%. Today nearly all of the sulfur and particulates are collected. I have been a strong critic of the EPA since the “War on Coal” began during the Clinton administration with the beginning of weaponization of government rules such as “New Source Review”. However, in 1970, the EPA was needed to clean our air and water.

Shortly after promulgation of the EPA the major air pollutants were identified that needed controls. These pollutants are sulfur, particulates, VOCs (volatile organic compounds), carbon monoxide, lead, oxides of nitrogen and ozone. Since 1970, the EPA has measured and reported the progress of cleaning the air and this progress of controlling the true pollutants is shown on the chart below.

Notice the increases since 1970 in population, GDP, energy use and miles driven. These all trended up, whereas the pollutants trended down 78%. This is a story that needs to be told.

We Figured Out How to Make Coal Plants Clean and Then the EPA was Politicized & Weaponized to Kill Them

The perfection of advanced flue gas cleanup occurred about the same time that the EPA became a political weapon. In other words, the air pollution industry succeeded in cleaning all of the harmful pollutants out of the flue gas stream just as the Obama administration declared CO2 a pollutant, which it is not.

This attempt to kill reliable, affordable, Dispatchable and on-site energy storable coal power has been very effective. Over half of the coal power plants in America have been shut down while the largest fuel source for power generation in the rest of the world is still coal and the coal use continues to rise.

Clean Coal Combustion in a Pulverized Coal Power Plant

Most of the coal power plants in the world use the pulverized coal firing method. I described the Zimmer coal plant in a previous article. “The Magnificent Heat Engines that Society Depends On”.

There are other forms of coal power including CFBs (Circulating Fluidized Beds), IGCC (Integrated Gasification, Combined Cycle), stoker firing and cyclone firing. PC Firing (Pulverized Coal) is the most common method used and that is what I will discuss with regard to the exhaust gas (flue gas) cleanup systems. Here is a typical schematic flow diagram of a PC steam generator and the flue gas flow path to the stack.

This schematic is from the Duke Energy Rogers Energy Center plant overview:

The flue gas cleanup equipment in the schematic is shown to approximate scale. The power generation equipment is dwarfed by the size of the flue gas cleanup systems. So is the number of employees required to maintain the chemical processes at the backend larger than those needed to operate and maintain the power generation equipment. Yes, the flue gas cleanup systems are expensive, but once built, the electricity production costs are mostly fuel. Thus, as natural gas prices rise, such as with the Middle East crisis, coal mined in America can be used competitively for power generation less expensively than natural gas fuel for power generation. All of the economic and operational advantages of coal power without pollution.

How the Pollutants are Controlled

Let’s take a look at the pollutants one at a time and take a look at how they are lessened or removed from the flue gas stream.

Sulfur Removal

Sulfur emissions were the main cause of acid rain and large coal power plants were the single largest source of atmospheric sulfur emissions. Corrections began with the invention and deployment of FGD (Flue Gas Desulfurization) systems about 1978. Since 1978 the efficacy of FGD systems have advanced. Here below is a schematic of a wet scrubber which utilizes a limestone slurry to capture the oxides of sulfur into a calcium oxide slurry to create calcium sulfate, aka gypsum. The waste calcium sulfate is often utilized for fertilizer and for manufacturing wall board as a byproduct.

From B&W Coal Combustion website: https://www.babcock.com/home/products/wet-scrubbers-fgd

Here is a typical installation of an FGD scrubber

More commonly used in the most modern coal plants for sulfur removal is Spray Dryer Absorbers. These collect the sulfur in small droplets of limestone slurry which is then transported in the gas stream to a Baghouse. The ash + limestone is collected on the surface of fabric filter bags and collected in hoppers beneath.

Particulates Removal

The equipment to collect particulates are Fabric Filter Baghouses. These have certain advantages, especially when used with SDAs (Spray Dryer Absorbers) because of the moist nature of the collected flyash, sulfur and lime slurry can continue to react with oxides of sulfur in the filter cake. Here is an illustration of a Baghouse, followed by a photo of an actual Fabric Filter Baghouse installed on a 650 MW coal plant.

The operating principle of a Fabric Filter Baghouse is basically the same as a home vacuum cleaner, where the dust is collected in a filter cake on the fabric surface. The filter cake then breaks up and falls by gravity to the hoppers below where it is then pneumatically removed and transported to ash storage.

Oxides of Nitrogen

Combustion of coal creates oxides of nitrogen from both the nitrogen in ambient air and from the nitrogen that is trapped in the coal fuel. If uncontrolled the NOx (an expression used to refer to all oxides of nitrogen) can contribute to ground level ozone, smog, acid rain and deterioration of visibility from photochemical smog. Therefore, oxides of nitrogen are drastically controlled to very low levels through a combination of modern low NOx combustion systems applied to the furnace. Then also by use of post-combustion SCRs (Selective Catalytic Reactors). The following two figures illustrate modern approaches to NOx controls.

First, Furnace solutions are low NOx burners combined with over-fire air systems to stage combustion.

Then, post combustion, SCRs (Selective Catalytic Reactors) are used to remove most of the remaining oxides of nitrogen. An illustration of an SCR is shown below.

The catalyst inside the SCR is reactive honeycomb ceramic as shown below.

Removal of Heavy Metals including Mercury

There are trace amounts of heavy metals in coal ash such as arsenic and mercury, Most of these are removed with the FGD (Flue Gas Desulfurization) system. Sometimes, if the mercury is above limits activated carbon injection is utilized to absorb and collect the mercury.

The Integrated Emissions Control System

The systems described above work together to collect or control the ash particulates, sulfur, NOx and mercury. One version of an integrated emissions control systems is shown below.

Stack Emissions are Harmless Water Vapor and CO2

The stack plumes are mentioned by those critical of coal power because they are so visible from far away. The fact is that the stack plumes are harmless water vapor, CO2 , nitrogen and oxygen not that much different than the exhaled breath of a human. Dr. William Happer gave a presentation a few years ago using that very example. Dr. Happer’s presentation is here.

Summary

Back in 1970 the boiler island comprised a steam generator and the fuel burning equipment. Minimum backend flue gas cleanup equipment was installed. There was no treatment of oxides of sulfur. Since 1970 the flue gas cleanup systems have advanced to huge chemical processing plants that require more manpower, maintenance and attention than the “Power Block” including the power generation equipment, steam generator, steam turbine and auxiliaries. The result is shown on the first chart above which shows the progress since 1970 in cleaning our air. The equipment for removal of harmful pollutants has been invented, perfected, installed, proven and continues to be commercially available. Another example is the John Turk Plant in Arkansas. This was POWER Magazines “Plant of the Year” in 2013 and is shown below. This is from the B&W success stories. https://www.babcock.com/home/products/spray-dryer-absorber-sda

Summary

Conclusions

  1. Coal has been wrongly demonized by NGOs, MSM, Entertainment, wealthy individuals and enemies of the U.S.
  2. Politicians have been duped into believing the “Manmade Global Warming Narrative” and that shutting down coal plants will make a difference. It won’t.
  3. Regulations and Laws have been wrongly applied to shut down coal plants and the coal industry
  4. Many of America’s elected officials have implemented policies that are Self-Sabotaging the once most reliable electric Grid in the world
  5. Utility executives are just as bad as the indoctrinated public and have chosen to follow the “Easiest path” to Bulk Power Supply. That path is, install lots of unreliable solar and wind and then back it up with natural gas turbines. Why? Because generating Bulk Power from coal fuel is complicated, expensive and simply harder to do. It takes hard work to overcome public resistance, more capital and more employees. It is simply a lot easier to take the renewables + CCGT path rather than the path of least cost, most reliable generation. Call it hitting the “Easy Button” But it is NOT best for America!
  6. The De-Regulation of electricity in the 1990’s has absolved most Electric Utilities of Accountability to construct the needed Dispatchable electricity generation capacity. Before De-Regulation each Regional Utility planned for growth to match needed Demand with available and affordable generation capacity.
  7. It costs much more Capital to “Burn Coal than to Mine it”
  8. The general public Energy IQ is very low. So is the Energy IQ of most politicians.
  9. The possibility of unreliable electric service is possible due to decades of public indoctrination
  10. The largest need today in Energy and Electricity Generation is better energy education of the public

References and Information for Further Reading

  1. CO Coalition References/Resources: https://co2coalition.org/media/
  2. Mathew McKean, Frontieras North America, article on the relationship of coal and Food production, May 2026:  https://www.frontieras.com/insights/they-killed-american-coal-china-kept-theirs-now-american-farmers-are-paying-the-price-and-frontieras-is-the-answer?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=6a0325f4634cd753b5fab061&ss_email_id=6a0326cf8cdc8d55bfb4c844&ss_campaign_name=They+Killed+American+Coal.+China+Kept+Theirs.+Now+Farmers+Are+Paying.&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-05-12T13%3A19%3A43Z
  3. American Coal Ash Association used U.S. Geological Survey data to compare the levels of heavy metals in coal ash to the levels present in ordinary rocks and soil. The study showed the levels to be comparable — which shouldn’t surprise anyone because that’s what coal ash is: “the non-combustible mineral portion of coal.” It’s the dirt and rock that were mixed in with the coal. There’s nothing about burning it that causes more to appear. The study can be found here: https://acaa-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/free-publications/ACAA_CoalAshMaterialSafety_June2012.pdf
  4. Other scientific studies of note: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducted risk analysis of the use of various coal combustion products in concrete, wallboard, and agriculture and found them all to be safe:https://acaa-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/ccr_bu_eval.pdf
  5. Beneficial Uses of Coal Ash: https://acaa-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/FGD_Ben_Use_Eval_with_Appendices_March_2023_508.pdf
  6. For a general overview of all of the ways millions of tons of coal ash are safely recycled in the U.S. each year, look here: https://acaa-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/22-ACAA-Brochure_FINAL.pdf
  7. There are lots more scientific reports, beneficial use case studies, and more on the publications tab of the ACAA:  https://acaa-usa.org
  8. Additional Informative websites:
  9. Coal Hard Truths:  https://thecoalhardtruth.com/myths-about-coal-renewable-energy/
  10. Count on Coal, ACC Blog: https://www.countoncoal.org/category/blog/
  11. Dick Storm, Liberty Univ. CEO Summit, panel notes, Sept. 2024: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7266497381574098944?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
  12. Coal Hard Truth on the Myths of Coal & Renewable Energy: https://thecoalhardtruth.com/myths-about-coal-renewable-energy/
  13. American Coal Ash Association:  https://acaa-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/22-ACAA-Brochure_FINAL.pdf
  14. Other scientific studies of note: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducted risk analysis of the use of various coal combustion products in concrete, wallboard, and agriculture and found them all to be safe:
    https://acaa-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/ccr_bu_eval.pdf
  15. Net Air Emission Benefits from the Remediation of Abandoned Coal Refuse Piles, Robert G. Fraser, QEP, and Patrick Fennell, PE, of TRC Environmental Inc.
  16. Comparison of the Impact on Greenhouse Gas Emissions Between Unabated Coal Refuse Piles and Reclamation-to-Energy Power Plants, Dr. Carlos Romero of the Energy Research Center at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA
  17. The Coal Refuse Reclamation to Energy Industry: Environmental and Economic Impact Analysis Update, Econsult Solutions, Inc.
  18. America’s Power Report on Fuels for Power Generation 2024: https://www.publicpower.org/resource/americas-electricity-generating-capacity
  19. PA Pundits Blog on “Coal Plants” 2021: https://wp.me/pJrS-WKK
  20. Lars Schernikau Blog on Rethinking Coal, May 2026: https://unpopular-truth.com/2026/04/25/rethinking-the-cost-of-electricity/?utm_source=brevo&utm_campaign=2026-04%20Rethinking%20the%20cost%20of%20electricity&utm_medium=email
  21. Lars Schernikau. On “Coal Keeps the Lights on” April 2026: https://unpopular-truth.com/2026/03/18/the-new-renaissance-of-coal/?utm_source=brevo&utm_campaign=2026-04-04%20newsletter%20Coals%20return&utm_medium=email
  22. Our World in Data Coal Power in world: https://ourworldindata.org/energy
  23. Dr. Happer presentation to Univ. of NC-2017 “CO2 is NOT a Pollutant: https://co2coalition.org/media/
  24. Dr. Richard Lindzen, of MIT “The Absurdity of Conventional Global Warming Narrative” : https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/The-Absurdity-of-the-Conventional-Global-Warming-Narrative.pdf
  25. WUWT on the High Cost of the Endangerment Finding, April 22, 2026:  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/21/the-end-of-epas-endangerment-finding-is-a-bigger-deal-than-the-iran-war/
  26. Kathryn Porter Blog post, Green vs. Base Load, April 2026, Outstanding overview of Dispatchable and Not-Dispatchable Power: https://watt-logic.com/2026/04/20/green-vs-baseload-the-most-suitable-energy-for-a-developing-country/
  27. The UnMade Energy Nation, By Pandreco on the foolish energy policies of Canada: https://open.substack.com/pub/pandreco/p/the-unmade-energy-nation?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
  28. Global Energy Monitor: https://globalenergymonitor.org
  29. Clintel organization of Climate Scientists mostly from Europe: https://clintel.org
  30. Ron Clutz, “What Has Coal Done for You Today?”:  https://rclutz.com/2026/04/26/what-coal-did-today/
  31. EU power prices increasing as a result of foolish EU Energy policy:  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/26/european-energy-policy-full-speed-towards-the-wall/?utm_source=noptin&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Post%20Notification%20Claude%20-%20European%20energy%20policy:%20full%20speed%20towards%20the%20wall
  32. Thomas J. Shepstone,Jr. on Politicians and Energy Policy:  https://open.substack.com/pub/energysecurityfreedom/p/if-politicians-mean-what-they-say?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
  33. Thomas J. Shepstone on De-Regulation: https://open.substack.com/pub/energysecurityfreedom/p/electric-deregulation-has-made-us?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
  34. Rafe Champion on the need to burn coal, April 29, 2026: https://open.substack.com/pub/rafechampion/p/why-do-nuclear-luddites-refuse-to?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
  35. “Always On” by Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, May 2026: https://energybadboys.substack.com
  36. Jo Nova on American Energy Dominance: May, 2026: https://joannenova.com.au/2026/05/the-usa-is-the-global-energy-powerhouse/
  37. Need more U.S. Built Ships to export our oil and gas, especially, LNG: https://open.substack.com/pub/energymusings/p/energy-musings-may-4-2026?r=kv1a9&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
  38.  CO2 Coalition Oped on, Harvard and Texas A&M, Who is Indoctrinating Students?”: https://co2coalition.org/2026/05/06/harvard-and-texas-am-which-one-is-indoctrinating/
  39. What a Barrell of Oil Provides: https://open.substack.com/pub/nathanhammer/p/what-a-barrel-of-oil-actually-makes?r=kv1a9&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
  40.  Lindzen, Happer and Koonin letter to SCOTUS, April 12, 2026: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/12/happer-lindzen-koonin-letter-to-the-federal-judicial-center/
  41. POWER Magazine article on Turk Power Plant 2013:
    https://www.powermag.com/aeps-john-w-turk-jr-power-plant-earns-powers-highest-honor/
  42. WUWT on the Importance of Fossil Fuels, April 14, 2026:  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/14/world-should-be-optimistic-about-our-fossil-fuel-future-bradley-op-ed-in-houston-chronicle/?utm_source=noptin&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Post%20Notification%20Claude%20-%20“World%20Should%20be%20Optim%C2%ADistic%20About%20Our%20Fossil%20Fuel%20Future”%20(Bradley%20op-ed%20in%20Houston%20Chronicle)
  43. NIPSCO Solar Farm Destruction by Tornado, 2026, Real Clear Energy: https://climatechangedispatch.com/indiana-solar-tornado-damage/
  44. CNN on replacing SHERCO with solar: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/16/climate/coal-to-solar-minnesota
  45. Coal Hard Truths: https://thecoalhardtruth.com/coal-sustainability/
  46. Electricity prices, U.S. Interactive chart 2004-2024: https://energybadboys.substack.com/p/visualizing-2026
  47. Electricity Rates in Blue States:  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/12/31/high-electricity-prices-are-a-choice-blue-states-make-every-day/
  48. German Power Plant Implosion, April 2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCqHFfPF2ys
  49. Wansley Demo: https://www.tiktok.com/@ashleydhb/video/7539239038146841869
  50. Bridgeport Harbor Coal Demo: https://www.ctpost.com/news/article/bridgeport-ct-power-plant-demolition-implosion-21053824.php
  51. Homer City Stacks Demo, April 2025: https://www.wtae.com/article/stack-homer-city-generating-station-demolished-build-energy-campus/64467737
  52. German Moorsburg Plant Demo. Only six years old, Example of a country’s Self Sabotage of their Lifeblood of reliable, Affordable, Dispatchable electricity generation capacity: https://debuglies.com/2025/03/26/germanys-moorburg-demolition-economic-costs-hydrogen-ambitions-and-the-global-implications-of-rapid-coal-phase-out-in-the-energiewende/
  53. Excellent article on the fundamentals of electricity generation covering VARs, Rotational Inertia, PF and more, Thomas J. Shepstone, Jan. 2026: https://open.substack.com/pub/digimus/p/inertia-and-reactive-power?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
  54. PJM Energy Transition Report showing Path to Reduced Carbon Generation that has led to Generation Capacity Shortages: https://www.pjm.com/-/media/DotCom/library/reports-notices/special-reports/2024/20240624-energy-transition-in-pjm-flexibility-for-the-future.pdf
  55. Electro Industry by NEMA, Excellent insight into electrical equipment manufacturing: https://www.makeitelectric.org/industry-impact/#guide-to-electroindustry
  56. To Lower Electricity Costs in Australia, WUWT, Dec. 1, 2025: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/11/30/how-to-cut-the-electricity-price-in-australia/
  57. Aussie AEMO Hits Panic Button, Dec. 1, 2025: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/12/01/aussie-aemo-pushes-the-grid-stability-panic-button/
  58. Our World in Data, Electricity Use, U.S. and China 1999-2024: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation?tab=chart&time=1999..2024&country=USA~CHN&mapSelect=USA~CHN~DZA&globe=1&globeRotation=44.78%2C-18.38&globeZoom=1.1&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
  59. Forbes on AI-Data Center Power Demand, Dec. 2025: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2025/11/27/why-americas-power-grid-will-be-able-to-withstand-the-25-trillion-ai-datacenter-building-boom/
  60. Cost of Electricity in Red and Blue States by Tom Pyle and Thomas Shepstone, Dec. 11, 2025: https://open.substack.com/pub/energysecurityfreedom/p/blue-state-energy-prices-blues-in?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
  61. Our World in Data, World Electricity Generation by Fuel: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
  62. NERC Winer Reliability Report: https://ow.ly/u0jz50XtJPh
  63. EXXON Energy Outlook: https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/sustainability-and-reports/global-outlook?tm=tt&ap=bads&aaid=adalCGdNG2F1z&gclid=9c510d91a93614ac0c4a64aa5eb059ef&gclsrc=3p.ds&cn=1ECX_BING_TRAF_XX_Non-Brand_EX%2BBR_Energy_P30Z0SP&agn=Non-Brand_Energy%20General&msclkid=9c510d91a93614ac0c4a64aa5eb059ef&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=1ECX_BING_TRAF_XX_Non-Brand_EX%2BBR_Energy_P30Z0SP&utm_term=types%20of%20energy%20sources&utm_content=Non-Brand_Energy%20General#ExploretheGlobalOutlook
  64. EIA STEO Dec. 2025, Forecast: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/elec_coal_renew.php
  65. GEMS, Coal Plants: https://globalenergymonitor.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Landing-page-Fig-1_-Coal-fleet-stacked-bar-and-line-chart-BB-2024@2x-1.png
  66. Americas Power, Coal Facts : https://americaspower.org/coal-facts/
  67. Congressional Report on Electricity Generation Capacity: https://www.publicpower.org/system/files/documents/Americas-Electricity-Generation-Capacity-2025-Update.pdfort on Coal Power, 2025: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R48587/R48587.1.pdf

This commentary was first published at Dick Storm’s Thoughts on Energy, Education, Economic Prosperity & Environmental Blog, May 14, 2026.

Richard F. Storm is a  CO2 Coalition member, a retired power industry veteran with over 50 years of experience in coal combustion and boiler performance optimization, who has worked globally with major companies including ALCOA, Freeport McMoran, and Southern Company, and is a longtime contributing editor to Power Magazine and founder of Storm Technologies.