“‘You let me name the people doing the analysis, and I can get you any outcome you desire.’ Cordato told a Cato Institute that cost-benefit analysis for demand-side management programs is essentially a bogus enterprise, doomed to failure, regardless of how carefully the analysis is performed.”
Great wine ages well. In this case, the nectar has no expiration date.
Some twenty-one years ago, a “libertarian economist” from Campbell University got attention in the energy press by popping a sacred cow of market-failure economics, social cost/benefit analysis as a basis for government intervention in markets. The occasion was a Cato Institute/Institute for Energy Research conference, “New Horizons in Electric Power Deregulation,” held on March 2, 1995, in Washington, DC.
In my dusty files, I recently found this writeup from The Quad Report (April 1995) that is reprinted below.…
“Contrary to the impression favored by governments, the corner has not been turned toward declining emissions and GHG amounts…. Negative CO2 emissions, i. e., extraction of CO2 from the air, is now required.”
– James Hansen, “Young People’s Burden.” October 4, 2016.
“The ponderous response of the climate system also means that we don’t need to instantaneously reduce GHG amounts.”
– James Hansen, “We Hold Truths to be Self-Evident“ December 2, 2016.
What a difference a few months make!
Just in time for holiday season, and for the Trump Administration, the father of the climate alarm, formerly a climate scientist with NASA/GISS, and now a full-time scientist/activist, has ameliorated his grand climate alarm. The 10-year ultimatum announced in 2006, made more dire in 2009 and since, is now moderated.…
…“Enron, and no one more than Ken Lay, time and again pledged allegiance to free enterprise, deregulation, privatization, and competition. Come the implosion, that rhetoric was taken at face value. If Enron was capitalism, then capitalism was prone to flim-flam, deception, and even fraud.”
“Enron was a paragon of crony capitalism and a master of politicized regulation. Like no other company in history, Enron leveraged non-market government opportunity in myriad and sustained ways that ultimately came at the expense of consumers, taxpayers, and investors.”
“Classical liberals applauded the fact that the market, not regulators, exposed and ruined Enron. True enough, but the broader point and the deeper moral of the story is this: Enron and Ken Lay, as they were and became, would not have existed in a truly capitalistic economy.”