“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children. It has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate.’” (Joe Romm, quoted in Thomas Friedman, Is the Inflection Point Near?, New York Times, March 7, 2009)
“Is there any more single-minded, simple pleasure than viewing with alarm? At times it is even better than sex.” (Kenneth Boulding (1970), p. 160. [1]
Are free-market optimists the dumb ones who jump off tall buildings and report that everything is fine, even breezy, on the way down? Or are those who fear, rant, and make this analogy bungee-jumping with reality?
The optimists have been jumping off buildings ever since Robert Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on Population was published in 1798–and not hitting the ground.…
“Climatology is becoming an increasingly dubious science, serving a political project… the policy cart is leading the scientific horse.”
– Judith Curry, City Journal, Winter 2019.
MasterResource has followed the science when it comes to climate change by profiling the work of Judith Curry, former head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and currently a private researcher. Once in the alarmist camp, she checked her premises post-Climategate and realized that “the cause” was corrupted at the expense of sober science, not to mention public policy.
Previous MasterResource posts on Curry, emphasizing bottom-line quotations, have been:
…“Energy was just the first step in so many other ways. But without energy, it all doesn’t happen.”
“… we’re at a very, very good point environmentally right now.”
“Anti-energy zealots are blinded by ideology. Democrats want to ban shale energy, but shale energy has reduced America’s carbon emissions by 527 million metric tons per year. So what are they doing? A much better record than the European Union, which is always telling us how to do it. We should be telling them how to do it, based on our economy.”
“And congratulations to all of you, our great energy people, for what you’ve been able to accomplish, especially in the last three years…. [T]he path to that future starts right here in shale country, with all of you — the proud patriots of Pennsylvania and Ohio and West Virginia.”