… under the Green New Deal, they don’t like clean, beautiful natural gas. They don’t like anything. They don’t know what they like. They sort of like wind, even though it kills all the birds. You want to see a bird cemetery? Go under a windmill sometime….
You know, in California, you go to jail for five years if you kill a bald eagle. If you go under a windmill, you see them all over the place.
– Donald Trump, “Remarks on Promoting Energy Infrastructure and Economic Growth,” Hackberry, Louisiana, May 14, 2019
Back in 1997, I published a long Policy Analysis for the Cato Institute, “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green’.” A section of that study, “The ‘Avian Mortality’ Problem,” addressed what President Trump recently said (above) 22 years later.…
“The golden era of American energy is now underway.” (President Donald Trump, The White House, May 14, 2019)
… under the Green New Deal, they don’t like clean, beautiful natural gas. They don’t like anything. (President Donald Trump, “Remarks on Promoting Energy Infrastructure and Economic Growth,” Hackberry, LA, May 14, 2019)
Who has been the most free-market energy President in U.S. history? In modern times, Ronald Reagan comes to mind. He decontrolled crude oil and petroleum products in his first week of office (January 1981), although Jimmy Carter’s phase-out of such regulation had just six months to go. Reagan did some other things to undo a decade of energy statism but fell short of his election goal of abolishing the US Department of Energy. [1]
Enter Donald Trump.…
“Jerry Taylor, in effect, faked his intellectual death to collect the insurance money. He founded a ‘libertarian’ think tank advocating open-ended climate/energy statism…. For his deceit, Taylor has gained power, attention, and pecuniary reward. And he has exacted his revenge on the Kochs (really classical liberalism) for their reform effort at Cato.”
[NOTE: This completes my two-part series on the fake conversion of Jerry Taylor. Part I was yesterday.]
Despite decades in the intellectual trenches, he is the author of no books and few scholarly articles. He holds no academic degree, having left college after some controversy, never to return. [1] He did his analysis on the fly (board game design was a competing passion, unlike the off-the-clock policy wonk).
But with beaucoup smarts, fire, superior articulation (written and verbal), a reliable worldview, and access to top thinkers and researchers, he became a first-rate public-policy intellectual and a sort of a Mr.…