The Innovationist vs. The Catastrophists

“Because we are not taught about how innovation really works, it is easy to fall prey to the idea that today’s way of life is going to collapse. But, as Smaller Lighter points out, time after time throughout history, catastrophism has been wrong. We’ve been “running out of oil” since the inception of oil–yet human […]

Wind? Biofuels? Get Real, a Contrarian Says

“Every so often we need someone to put in a kind word for the devil, if only to remind us of unpleasant facts. On energy policy, we need someone willing to declare flat out that ‘if oil didn’t exist, we would have to invent it. No other substance comes close to oil when it comes […]

The Neo-Malthusians

… Bryce presents neo-Malthusian catastrophists with a choice: If climate change is the result of rising global demand for energy, and we all agree that we should address climate change, then world leaders can either limit the available supplies of energy — thus denying billions of the world’s poor the security and prosperity that ample, […]

Defending Human Ingenuity And Innovation

“Worldwide living standards are getting better, driven by humans’ desire for making things Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper. This is the title of Robert Bryce’s new book in which he devotes 300 pages to refuting the claims of those neo-Malthusians who think mankind is near or at “peak everything.” Instead of accepting this “collapse anxiety,” […]

How To Defuse the Power Elite

Bryce’s engrossing survey has two purposes. The first is to refute pessimists who claim that technology-driven economic growth will burn through the planet’s resources and lead to catastrophe. “We are living in a world equipped with physical-science capabilities that stagger the imagination,” he writes. “If we want to bring more people out of poverty, we […]

Beautiful Progress

Part of the fun of Bryce’s book comes from the sheer range of his examples. In one chapter, we learn how the weight of the Tour de France winner’s bicycle fell by more than half between 1903 and 2003, before the Tour stepped in and imposed minimum weight requirements for competing bicycles). In another, Bryce […]

Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper by Robert Bryce

Bryce delights in mocking the pessimists of the past and the present, with their anxieties over the prospects of environmental collapse and resource depletion, and deploys plenty of hard data to support his sunny view of the future. The reason for his confidence is summed up in his title. For the past two centuries, people […]

A Valuable Source of In-Depth Energy Information

Few science books are worth reading each and every page. Climatism, by Steve Gorham, (reviewed here in March) is an exception. Power Hungry is not, but without doubt it contains more than enough great information to make it a terrific buy for anyone with a strong interest in the nation’s energy supply…. A full 54 […]

Power Hungry

Bryce deftly sets out to debunk the myths of the ever popular going green campaign and answers more specific technological difficulties and cost containment issues. “The hard truth is that we must make decisions about how to proceed on energy very carefully, because America simply cannot afford to waste any more money on programs that […]

A Call for Energy Realism

…the promise of renewables has consistently been oversold by the political class. Solar and wind energy both suffer from major structural deficiencies. As Bryce observes, they are “incurably intermittent” and very difficult to store, and have low power density. Because of their low density, solar and wind “require huge swaths of land — which often […]

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