“Big Government Democrats are not the cure to Big Government Republicanism. Oil, natural gas, and coal are middle class, working class energies. Wind and solar are for the rich…. Maybe, just maybe, these parasitic, inefficient energies will get the scrutiny they deserve from all sides of the political spectrum.”
The beginning of the Obama presidency was less than one month away. Things looked bad for energy. Climate exaggeration and alarmism as US policy was coming up. And there were very few of us in the free market camp to fight against climate/energy statism.
Eight years ago this month, I got in touch with these few–Marlo Lewis (Competitive Enterprise Institute), Ken Green (American Enterprise Institute), and Jerry Taylor (Cato Institute), and a few others–to launch a new website. Two-thousand one-hundred and twenty-seven posts later, we are into year nine of “a free market energy blog.”…
“This year, the fossil fuel industry may top the list of Americans feeling most thankful. The election of Donald Trump not only promises to grant many of their fondest deregulation wishes, but it could also offer a potential Black Friday-like atmosphere on things like drilling leases and access to public lands.”
So began a fundraising pitch from Inside Climate News, a investigative journalism outfit starting from false premises to reach false conclusions.
The headlines from the same outfit in the same week were happy ones from a pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer, anti-coercion viewpoint.
How Much of Obama’s Climate Agenda Can Trump Undo With the Stroke of a Pen? by Sabrina Shankman
Here are 9 Obama Environmental Regulations in Trump’s Crosshairs by Marianne Lavelle
Donald Trump and Climate Change: Top 10 Ways He Could Reverse Progress by John H.
“The Obama Administration brought out the worst in RFF in the last eight years. Will the Trump era of new energy/climate thinking be intellectually respected and debated under RFF’s new president, Richard Newell? One can only hope that RFF does not become Fortress RFF.”
“RFF’s blockade against critics of climate alarmism/forced energy transformation is a sad case of intellectual back-of-the-bus, separate-water-fountain discrimination.”
“RFF has trenchantly avoided a real debate over the ‘social cost of carbon’ (SCC). Yet the assumptions behind the Obama Administration’s SCC are highly disputable, and reasonable assumptions can flip the sign from positive to negative (as in CO2 has net benefits) to eviscerate any case for pricing CO2.”
Maybe it is only because they have to.
Resources for the Future (RFF), founded in 1952, describes itself as “an independent, nonpartisan organization that conducts rigorous economic research and analysis to help leaders make better decisions and craft smarter policies about natural resources and the environment” that is “committed to intellectual excellence and practical solutions.”…