Articles by
Mike Barnard
Electric Cars Don’t Pay Gas Taxes: So What?
By
Mike Barnard
Is it a sin that electric car owners don’t pay gas taxes? No, not at all, but you’d never know it listening to some people squawk. There are anti-electric car types who think this is a huge deal, instead of kind of an embarrassing story for internal combustion cars. Let’s tear it apart and see, shall we?
What countries have the most wind power per capita as of December 2015?
By
Mike Barnard
The answer is Denmark by a mile, followed by Germany then Spain. I'm pleased to see Canada in fourth spot, beating USA and the UK by a reasonable amount.
Why Do People Argue Against Electric Cars?
By
Mike Barnard
Every day brings another headline about a bad study making false claims about electric cars, another well-known-enough person sneering at them, or another video of someone rolling coal all over an electric car.
VW Is A Symptom Of Widespread Automotive Disruption
By
Mike Barnard
The VW emissions scandal isn’t an outlier, but a symptom of the reality that internal combustion cars, whether gas or diesel, have reached the limits of effective compromises that will satisfy regulators and consumers.
EVs Could Cut Global Gasoline Use By 2040
By
Mike Barnard
A tipping point has been reached in the last two years for electric cars. Almost half of all fully or partially electric vehicles sold in the past decade were sold in 2014. In addition to the standard-bearing Tesla, every car manufacturer in the world has fully or partially electric cars in their lineups. The most exciting cars in the world are now electric.
Fiscally and morally bankrupt: the cost of fighting wind farms
By
Mike Barnard
Instead Forest has spent over $500,000 of its taxpayers’ money to fight close to $600,000 in annual increases in local wealth. Does anyone really think that the citizens of Forest were fully informed and agreed to spend over 80% of a year’s property taxes to make their town poorer?
Rand and Ambrose’s Falmouth study is noise, not signal
By
Mike Barnard
Stephen Ambrose and Robert Rand are US acousticians who believe that wind turbine noise is somehow uniquely making people sick. In 2011, they were contracted by Bruce McPherson, a Falmouth Massachusetts resident, to do a study of the noise from one of the turbines on the municipal water treatment plant. They produced a consulting report which continues to be cited by anti-wind organizations worldwide. So how does it stand up?
EPI: Wind Health Impacts Dismissed in Court
By
Mike Barnard
Wind health impacts have been dismissed in courts across the globe. This Energy and Policy Institute report assesses legal cases in five English-speaking countries pertaining to wind energy. The intent is to provide clarity in assessing potential legal liability, and to identify the weaknesses of evidence and expertise that are common in health-related suits against wind farms.
Nuclear and carbon capture aren’t scalable compared to wind energy
By
Mike Barnard
There’s an enduring myth related to wind energy and nuclear energy that needs to be put to bed. That myth is that only nuclear can be scaled to sufficient capacity to reduce the impacts of global warming, and that wind energy is much less scalable so it should be ignored. And there’s another myth related to carbon capture and sequestration that has to be assessed as well.
Wind Crank Index
By
Mike Barnard
With thanks to the long-lasting science Crackpot Index, this Wind Crank Index is intended to provide a simple way to figure out how you should invest your time: helping the person understand more about wind energy or figuring out how to correct the damage they are doing.
Sheerwind Invelox: all hype, no substance
By
Mike Barnard
Sheerwind makes radically inappropriate comparisons between their long-disproven approach to wind generation and actually useful wind generation. The numbers show that they are likely about eighteen times worse at generating electricity from moving air than a truly equivalent wind turbine would be, and will require an order of magnitude more material to achieve that.
Solar Wind Energy Towers: harvesting R&D dollars for decades
By
Mike Barnard
Smart people reinvent variations of these things fairly often. People get enthused about them, get people to invest, build prototypes which don’t work as hoped. The prototypes get abandoned and hopefully get torn down. There are a few around, and they pop up in speculative fiction occasionally, but they just aren’t economically viable in reality.
