“We have long discovered that nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program.” (- Ronald Reagan)

In the 1970s – fifty years ago now – The Energy Crisis jolted the U.S. economy, causing shortages and long lines at gas stations. In response, various federal energy policies and programs were passed. And as the decades passed, layer-upon-layer of new federal energy programs and regulations were added, then extended and expanded.

The energy crisis is decades past, and technology advances in oil and natural gas drilling have yielded booming supplies, allowing the U.S. to become a major oil and natural gas exporter. So maybe it is time (or past time) to “push the button” to end the dense and expensive thicket of federal energy market interventions (including subsidies and mandates for wind, solar, ethanol, electric vehicles, plus fuel economy standards).…

“Many people think that the threat of ‘global warming’ arose only towards the end of the twentieth century…. Climate change, either natural or anthropogenic, has been discussed from the classical age onwards, evolving from the expected benefits of climate engineering to today’s fear of global disaster.”

– Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, “Climate Change in Perspective,” Nature, June 8, 2000, p. 615

It is all gloom, what Michael Mann cautioned against as “doomism.”[1] Such alarm has been the mainstream narrative—and wrong—since the 1960s. And warnings about how exaggeration can backfire (New York Times: “In Climate Debate, Exaggeration Is a Pitfall“) have been thrown to the wind in the futile, costly pursuit of Net Zero.

This post presents the climate alarm quotations of today with the quotations from Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the late 1960s/early 1970s for historical perspective.…

“A new ice age would flood the world’s coastal cities and further lower temperatures to build up new glaciers that could eventually cover huge areas.” (1971)

The warming alarmists dismiss the cooling alarmists of yesterday as fringe and ignorant. But some of the biggest names of the day back then would not take too kindly to the know-it-alls of today.

Alex Epstein has coined the term catastrophicism to describe the age-old Malthusian itch. Back in the 1970s, top scientists such as NASA’s S. I. Rasool, an atmospheric physicist at Columbia University, and Stephen Schneider of National Center for Atmospheric Research, were making headlines about future climate change–from people, not nature.

“Scientists have long debated whether man’s activity is actually heating or cooling the earth,” the Washington Post article below notes.

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Ed. Note: The author has been in the trenches as a consumer and free market advocate against the monopoly utilities in natural gas and particularly electricity. His “bottom lines” follow.

“It is time to end this marriage of vested privilege and authoritarian ideology and abolish the monopoly-regulator system.”

There is no such thing as a natural monopoly; government creates all monopolies. There was never any real justification for the regulation of the utility business. The existence of utility regulation is a triumph of political entrepreneurship by the incumbent utility companies to use the power of state government to gain dominance over their customers, to eliminate their more efficient competitors and to obtain recovery on their bad investments.
 
The system of politicized energy distribution consumes more resources than necessary to provide service. …