“Your paper inspired me to re-review some of the congressional testimony of the renewable interests to see whether the litmus test of success was a cost target or more generally, competitiveness and market penetration. I think it is clearly the latter.”
“Imagine the coach of a football team justifying a perennial losing record by telling the administration that his players are getting bigger and faster …. Surely the administration would respond—’yes, we know the general trend and our participation in it. But we want real victories, not moral victories’.”
– Letter from Robert Bradley to Dallas Burtraw, January 1999.
It was arguably the very top intellectual research paper to justify past and continuing U.S. government support for renewable energies at the time of its publication (1999). I had a chance to rebut, working at Enron (as director, public policy analysis) that was a financial supporter of Resources for the Future (RFF), as well as a business leader in renewables.…
“Veterans of earlier crises, economists prominently among them, suspected another rebirth of Malthusian fear and asked how [global warming] differed from the last several.”
– Robert Fri, “Global Warming: A Policymaker’s Dilemma” (President’s Report). Resources for the Future: 1988 Annual Report, pp. 6–7.
“The accumulation of large amounts of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere is slowly raising the global temperature and disrupting climate patterns, with implications for economic stability worldwide. Research and analysis at RFF supports informed policy design and negotiations to address climate change on national and international levels.”
– Resources for the Future website (2016).
Oh how Resources for the Future (RFF) has bought entirely into climate alarmism and forced energy transformation for fun and profit. The two quotations above, a quarter century apart, say much.
I was reminded of old-versus-new RFF by its press release last week tied to President Obama’s final state of the union speech.…
“As early as the third page of the draft agreement is the acknowledgment that its CO2 target won’t keep the global temperate rise below 2 deg C, the level that was once set as the critical safe limit.”
– Professor Paul Beckwith (University of Ottowa) et al., Letter to The Independent, January 2016.
James Hansen struck first, predicting that the Paris accord would be a farce–then following up by labeling the agreement “bullshit.” Although he cannot seem to question his high-climate-sensitivity science conclusion, Hansen had done the math and knows that only a very high carbon tax and rush to nuclear power can reduce CO2 emissions meaningfully, not paper promises and renewable-energy subsidies.
Now comes a group of scientists arguing that since manmade greenhouse gas emissions are not going to be appreciably reduced in the next years and decades, world governments must embark on a crash course to reverse engineer the planet (a new round of public funding for sure).…