“Milton Friedman’s timeless energy insights should be appreciated for all time.”
Born on this day 106 years ago, free-market economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was one of a kind. Even the dyspeptic Paul Krugman called his rival “the economist’s economist…a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived.” The Economist (November 23, 2006) called him “the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century… and possibly all of it.”
Milton Friedman’s major professional mark was in monetary economics. But as a public intellectual, writing popular books and a biweekly Newsweek column, he became conversant in different fields, including energy.
Friedman understood how, for much of US history, major energy regulation was sponsored by some segment of the industry.…
“We have no room for error…. Barring a major reversal in U.S. policies in the very next decade, come the 2020s, most everyone will know the grim fate that awaits the next fifty generations.”
“[The alternative to inaction] is a [later] massive, sustained government intervention into every aspect of our lives on a scale that far surpasses what this country did during World War II.”
Dr. Exaggeration… Dr. Doom… Dr. Wrong. Part I yesterday examined Joe Romm’s 1996 co-authored piece in The Atlantic Monthly, “Mideast Oil Forever?” Today’s post examines quotations and predictions from Romm’s book, Hell and High Water (Morrow: 2007).
The book’s opening quotation comes from James Hansen. “We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption.” And then Romm’s opening:
…Imagine if inland United States were 10℉ hotter, with many states ravaged by mega-droughts and the widespread wildfires that result.
“To the extent that the Gulf’s recapture of the dominant share of the global oil market will make price increases more likely, the U.S. economy is at risk…. Since 1970 sharp increases in the price of oil have always been followed by economic recessions in the United States.”
– Charles Curtis and Joseph Romm, “Mideast Oil Forever?” The Atlantic Monthly, April 1996.
“This notion that the environmental movement — or any other major play in the media landscape — is pushing non-stop apocalyptic messages like a broken record is one I debunked ….”
– Joe Romm, “A Critique of the Broken-Record Counterfactual Message of the New York Times on Environmentalists and Scientists,” ThinkProgress, April 29, 2012.
Joe Romm, the climate-alarmist doyen of ThinkProgress (Center for American Progress), has long been subject to rebuttal at MasterResource.…