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Remember the Edsel? Most readers probably don’t, as they aren’t old enough to recall car events in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But I’m a geezer, as well as a car guy. I well remember Ford’s monumental failure, producing a mid-range car designed to compete with General Motors’ Buick and Oldsmobile lines. When Ford […]

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former Democrat, Independent, Republican mayor of New York City, is not one of my heroes. I don’t know whether he was a good or bad mayor of a difficult city to govern. His “stop-and-frisk” policies give me the willies. Beyond New York, I found his $50 million support of the Sierra […]

This spring marks the 200th anniversary of the first publication of William Smith’s stratigraphic map of the England. It was, as geologist and splendid writer Simon Winchester titled his 2001 book, “The Map that Changed the World.” The remembrance is getting a low-key acknowledgement in both the U.K. and U.S., to my chagrin. In this […]

Are fossil fuels finite, eventually doomed to run out as mankind exploits them? That’s the conventional wisdom, regardless of one’s views on how long that might be, and whether it really matters (as the higher prices of a diminishing resource should bring on new resources and technologies). But the frequent handwringing about peak gas, following […]

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) is a fool. Is he a dangerous fool or just a typical political buffoon? My suspicion is the latter. But I could be wrong. Here’s the story. Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, late last month sent letters to seven universities seeking information about the funding for […]

A long posting and following discussion on Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. blog on the topic of “Public intellectuals in the climate space” prompted me to recall an apposite thought, written long before the heated (and often overheated) arguments over global warming. A postcard on my office bulletin board, which I’ve had for at least a […]

A small Philadelphia energy trading firm, charged by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission with market manipulation, has fired back at the agency with a delightful in-your-face response. Dissecting FERC’s show cause order claiming that Powhatan Energy Fund manipulated the PJM market, Powhatan’s law firm, Drinker Biddle & Reath, makes it clear it is ready for […]

Two developments yesterday, one quiet, one rather loud, suggest the long-predicted existential threat to the traditional utility model may be at hand. The quiet news came from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), which reported that utility-scale solar generation crossed the 5-GW mark for the first time yesterday. Between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. PST, […]

In late January, President Obama traveled to India and met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a photo op, touting a new civilian nuclear power deal. Obama claimed that the new deal was a “breakthrough understanding.” The Washington Post reported, “The White House said the agreement involved the provision of insurance pools and an assurance […]

For more than 25 years, feedback-loop global circulation models (GCMs) have been the staple of predictions of the pace of global warming and the effects of the warming on the world. A new PhD dissertation from The Netherlands casts fundamental doubts about the value of the models. (A hat-tip to Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry for […]