By Robert Bradley Jr. -- April 18, 2016
Earlier today, the online subscription news service Greenwire published this item:
OBITUARY: Hurricane researcher-turned-climate denier dies at 86
William Gray, who pioneered hurricane forecasting tools as a professor at Colorado State University and voiced skepticism of climate change models, died Saturday.
The university said Gray, 86, died peacefully at home with his family.
Gray and his researchers were among the first to link the El Niño phenomenon to the formation of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea in their predictions.
“He consistently issued these forecasts for over 30 years, a track record unparalleled for university predictions,” said Phil Klotzbach, one of Gray’s researchers.
Gray, a Washington, D.C., native and alumnus of George Washington University, questioned the science of climate change in his later years.
“How can we trust climate forecasts 50 and 100 years into the future (that can’t be verified in our lifetime) when they are not able to make shorter seasonal or yearly forecasts that could be verified?”
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By Robert Bradley Jr. -- April 13, 2016
Editor Note: This morning, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hear testimony about energy from a philosophical perspective. Alex Epstein is a panelist at the hearing, Examining the Role of Environmental Policies on Access to Energy and Economic Opportunity. Other speakers are Father Robert A. Sirico, President, Acton Institute; Major General (Ret.) Robert Scales, Senior Military Analyst; Michael Breen, President & CEO, Truman National Security Project; and Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson II, Director, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
His opening comments as submitted follow (subtitles have been added).
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The energy industry is the industry that powers every other industry. To the extent energy is affordable, plentiful, and reliable, human beings thrive. To the extent energy is unaffordable, scarce, or unreliable, human beings suffer.
And yet in this election year, the candidates, especially the Republican candidates, have barely discussed energy.…
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- April 12, 2016
A simple principle of economics is that value is subjective. Prices, and thus profit and loss, come from the (subjective) value that market participants place on goods and services. So if costs are greater than the revenues of a product, then economic value is lost; if revenues are greater than the cost, economic value is created.
Enter recycling, which has turned (even more so) into an economic loser in the current era of low commodity prices. What this means is that the cost of sorting and transforming trash into useful products is less than the revenue–and recycling should not be done.
And as the distinguished resource scholar Pierre Desrochers has explained, [1] recycling has been a loser for decades:
Domestic waste recycling has long been a money loser ever since plastics came along.
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