“Big Green consists of several ‘environmental’ organizations, including Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), each with $100+M budgets, each springing from high-minded useful beginnings, each with more high-priced lawyers than you can shake a stick at. EDF … was chief architect of the disastrous Kyoto lemon. NRDC proudly claims credit for Obama’s EPA strategy and foolishly allows it to migrate to Paris.”
“The danger is that Paris will lay a Kyoto.”
– James Hansen, “Isolation of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Part I,” November 27, 2015.
James Hansen speaks truth to power when it comes to the politics of climate change. (On the science, he has staked out an alarmist position that he cannot seem to shake, even at this late date.) In previous posts, I have noted Hansen’s recalcitrance toward cap-and-trade, whether federal, state (California), or in another country (Australia or Quebec/Ontario).…
“The true meaning of Thanksgiving is the triumph of Capitalism over the failure of Collectivism in all its forms.”
This time of the year, whether in good economic times or bad, is when Americans gather with their families and friends and enjoy a Thanksgiving meal together. It marks a remembrance of those early Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the uncharted ocean from Europe to make a new start in Plymouth, Massachusetts. What is less appreciated is that Thanksgiving also is a celebration of the birth of free enterprise in America.
The English Puritans, who left Great Britain and sailed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620, were not only escaping from religious persecution in their homeland. They also wanted to turn their back on what they viewed as the materialistic and greedy corruption of the Old World.…
“The proposals offered thus far for adoption at the UN Paris conference to drastically reduce world GHGs and hydrocarbon use by 2050 are fatally flawed, unrealistic and impossible to achieve without destroying the world economy.”
[Editor note: The first part of this post ran yesterday at MasterResource.]
Policy prescriptions for drastically reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, to keep global temperatures from increasing by 2° or 3° Celsius (3.5 to 5.5° Fahrenheit), are based on unverified computer model projections, which are themselves based on the much-contested assumption that carbon dioxide now controls Earth’s climate.
Even if that assumption is correct, however, eliminating fossil fuels over the next 35 years would reduce world per capita GDP to only about 4% of what it is otherwise forecast to be, under a “business as usual” scenario.…