WhatFinger


Paul Driessen

Paul Driessen is a senior fellow with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, nonprofit public policy institutes that focus on energy, the environment, economic development and international affairs. Paul Driessen is author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power, Black death

Older articles by Paul Driessen

Most Recent Articles by Paul Driessen:

The new robber barons

An oil and natural gas boom is underway in the United States, born of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” It has created tens of thousands of well-paying jobs directly, and hundreds of thousands more in hundreds of businesses that supply and support the industry and its workers.
- Saturday, December 22, 2012

Stop subsidizing the slaughter!

Congress and the White House are struggling to find even one subsidy or entitlement program that they are willing to cut. But the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) insists that the 2.2-cents per kilowatt-hour Production Tax Credit (PTC) for wind electricity must be preserved yet again – and then (maybe, partially) phased out over the next five years. With combined subsidy and PTC price tag of $12 billion in 2013, this is utter nonsense.
- Monday, December 17, 2012

Obama’s Walt Disney energy policies

In Walt Disney’s 1940 animated film “Pinocchio,” woodcarver Geppetto dreams that his wooden marionette will turn into a real boy. Geppetto’shopes are immortalized in the song “When You Wish Upon a Star,” which begins: “When you wish upon a star/ Makes no difference who you are/ Anything your heart desires/ Will come to you.”
- Monday, December 10, 2012

Facing a triple threat: Doha, EPA and Congress

Climate alarmists are meeting in Doha, Qatar, to hammer out a new international treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires this year. The US Environmental Protection Agency is poised to unleash its first wave of carbon dioxide regulations. And Congress is teaming up with the White House to legislate taxes on hydrocarbon use and CO2 emissions, on top of pending tax hike on “the rich.”
- Monday, December 3, 2012

Fractured fairy tales

Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have boosted shale gas production from zero a few years ago to 10% of all US energy supplies in 2012, observes energy analyst Daniel Yergin. Fracking has also increased US oil production 25% since 2008 – almost all on state and private lands, and in the face of more federal land and resource withdrawals, permitting delays and declining public land production.
- Friday, November 2, 2012

Perverse environmentalist oil sands ethics

The duplicity and hypocrisy of environmental pressure groups seem to be matched only by their consummate skill at manipulating public opinion, amassing political power, securing taxpayer-funded government grants, and persuading people to send them money and invest in “ethical” stock funds.
- Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Winners and losers energy policies

Governor Mitt Romney strongly supports North American energy independence as the foundation of renewed US employment and prosperity. President Obama is waging war on fossil fuels, job creation, and efforts to end our economic recession and reduce dependence on Middle Eastern and Russian oil.
- Thursday, October 18, 2012

Climate Alarmism: Our sanity and wallets need a break

Pick up any 40-year-old science textbook – on chemistry, biology, geology, physics, astronomy or medicine – and you’ll find a slew of “facts” and theories that have been proven wrong or are no longer the “consensus” view. Climatology is no exception.
- Monday, September 17, 2012

Government of, by and for the EPA

Seven score and nine years ago, President Lincoln resolved to take increased devotion to ensuring that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.
- Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Western wildfires—horrific, destructive…and unnecessary

Millions of Americans watched their evening news in horrified fascination. The Colorado Springs wildfire had doubled in size overnight, to 24 square miles--half the size of San Francisco--as 50-mph gusts carried fiery branches from exploding treetops across fire breaks, down Waldo Canyon and into fresh stands of drought-dried timber.
- Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Caught in a green crossfire

President Obama has waged war on fossil fuels for three and a half years – and American consumers and families are caught in the green energy crossfire.
- Friday, July 13, 2012

Dodging another UN bullet

The Future We Want outlined a “common vision” for planetary “sustainable development,” as proclaimed by the “Organizing Partners of the Major Group of NGOs,” to guide the taxpayer-funded Rio+20 summit that ended last week in disarray and acrimony.
- Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Rio+20 is greatest threat to biodiversity

The UN Conference on Sustainable Development is underway in Rio de Janeiro. This time, 20 years after the original 1992 Rio “Earth Summit,” thousands of politicians, bureaucrats and environmental activists are toning down references to “dangerous man-made climate change,” to avoid repeating the acrimony and failures that characterized its recent climate conferences in Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban.
- Wednesday, June 20, 2012

“Sustainable justice” = redistribution of scarcity

Presidential candidate Barack Obama promised that his Administration would “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” He gave a clue to exactly what he had in mind when he told now-congressional candidate Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher: “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
- Tuesday, June 19, 2012

America’s actual health and welfare crisis

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says we face grave threats to human health, welfare and justice. She’s absolutely right. However, the dangers are not due to factory or power plant emissions, or supposed effects of “dangerous manmade global warming.”
- Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Rare corporate courage and common sense

Good for Wal-Mart! Despite intense pressure by anti-biotechnology activists, the retailing giant didn't cave in to demands that it "reject" Monsanto's genetically engineered (GE) sweet corn (maize).
- Monday, May 21, 2012

Time to terminate Big Wind subsidies

Unprecedented! As bills to extend seemingly perpetual wind energy subsidies were again introduced by industry lobbyists late last year, taxpayers finally decided they'd had enough.
- Wednesday, May 9, 2012

The folly of E15 anti-hydrocarbon policies

The Obama Administration’s anti-hydrocarbon ideology and “renewable” energy mythology continues to subsidize crony capitalists and the politicians they help keep in office – on the backs of American taxpayers, ratepayers and motorists. The latest chapter in the sorry ethanol saga is a perfect example, biofuels
- Tuesday, April 24, 2012

“Greenbacks” energy boondoggles versus real energy

Having had it with $4-per-gallon gasoline and the Obama Administration’s squandering billions of taxpayer dollars on phony “green” energy schemes, angry voters have told their senators “Enough!”
- Saturday, April 14, 2012

Fracking: An existential threat to green dogma

The Sierra Club and other environmental pressure groups are redoubling their efforts to "stop fracking in its tracks." No wonder. The technology is an existential threat to fundamental "green" dogmas. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing is a true "game changer." In less than two years, this proven but still rapidly advancing technology has obliterated longstanding claims that we are running out of petroleum. Instead, the USA now finds itself blessed with centuries of oil and gas.
- Wednesday, March 28, 2012

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