“Energy consumption is not a villain. Nations that consume the most energy per person discharge the lowest level of air and water pollutants per person. Low-cost energy provides economic growth and generates capital for pollution control.”
Editor note: Steve Goreham has written another primer of note. The author of Climatism!: Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic (2010) and The Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change (2012), Goreham has just published a fun, readable book with great political timing.
The audience for Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development is not only any classroom studying energy choices and related public policies. Goreham is targeting the green consultant. The back cover explains:
…Your firm spends millions to be environmentally sustainable. Carbon credits, renewable energy, ethanol fuel, and electric vehicles demonstate your company’s commitment.
“In its rush to regulate greenhouse gases in 2009, the Obama Administration missed an important step. It utterly failed to submit the greenhouse gas endangerment finding to the Science Advisory Board for peer review, as required by statute, and that violation is fatal to the endangerment finding.”
– Robert Henneke, director, Center for the American Future. Texas Public Policy Foundation Press Release. May 2, 2017
It is time to play offense. Legal issues aside, numerous lines of evidence have come together to strengthen the intellectual case that the increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) is a net planetary benefit, or a positive externality in the jargon of economics.
This week, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) filed a petition with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency challenging the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding designating man-made greenhouse gas emissions as a danger to human health.…
Here is an energy joke that gets laughs from just about everyone except for the climate alarmists/energy coercionists:
“When is an environmentalist not an environmentalist?”
Answer: “When it comes to windpower.”
The mainstream environmentalist quandary, indeed, is lobbying for the most dilute and unreliable energies versus the real thing: dense, storable, and portable oil, gas, and coal.
The DC-based eco-crowd dismisses nuclear power as an alternative to carbon-rich energies, which led Michael Shellenberger of Environmental Progress to urge readers to not participate in last Saturday’s climate march. It’s an interesting public policy world….
Jones vs. McKibben
I was reminded of eco-tradeoffs recently when reading a grassroots challenge to activist Bill McKibben, the founder of the war-on-fossil-fuel organization 350.0rg.
The op-ed in the Vermont newspaper The Daily Digger was published back in February 2013.…