“Although advocacy of aggressive climate-change policies is often draped with the mantle of science, mainstream economists who follow the scientific literature have shown that the popular 1.5°C policy target will pose costs that far exceed the benefits, and that the emission reductions flowing from strict adherence to the 1.5°C target would be worse for the world than doing nothing at all.” (Murphy and McKitrick, below)
Adaptation, not mitigation, has long been the answer of climate economics for climate policy. In fact, at lower climate sensitivity estimates, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are thought to be a positive externality, in the jargon of economics, not a negative requiring government correction.
A new study by Robert P. Murphy and Ross McKitrick, Off Target: The Economics Literature Does Not Support the 1.5C Climate Ceiling, explains this to professional economists and the climate intelligentia alike.…
… the prospect of cheap, inexhaustible power from fusion is “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child,” Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich says. Laments Washington-based author-activist Jeremy Rifkin, “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet.”
So what do Big Government, anti-freedom eco-activists really want?
This is the perennial question regarding nuclear power, which is really the only scalable low-to-no CO2-emitting choice for electrical generation. When recently asked this question by a political economist friend who only tangentially follows energy, I went to Google to find the Paul Ehrlich quotation above. And lo-and-behold, I found a whole article around it!
Paul Ciottin’s, “Fear of Fusion: What if It Works?” appeared in the Los Angeles Times on April 19, 1989. It is certainly worth revisiting in its entirety some 32 years later.…
I have noted many times how the old hometown Houston Chronicle had gone from Left to Hard Left on energy and climate policy in the last decade or more. (Also see here and here.)
I am been a victim, with enough op-ed rejections (as in no response) to discourage me from submission.
But from time to time, I write a letter-to-the-editor on some egregiously biased energy piece. Chris Tomlinson, whose mind is about as closed and pen as vitriolic as they come (bitterness?), gets my goat in particular.
Dry Hole
And so several weeks ago, I sent this letter in, which got no response or publication regarding: “Conservative group takes on climate change” by Chris Tomlinson (Houston Chronicle, July 5, 2021).
…The latest Republican interest in climate change activism remains a far cry from 2008 when a televised commercial had Newt Gingrich on a couch with Nancy Pelosi extolling cap-and-trade “to address climate change.”