“In the United Nations Paris Accord last December world leaders promised to try to reduce future emissions. These politicians shamelessly clapped each other on the back, pretending they had accomplished something important. However, they had agreed beforehand not to even discuss the only action that could rapidly reduce global emissions.”
– James Hansen, “‘I am an Energy Voter’” February 23, 2016.
James Hansen is mad at the “I am an Energy Voter” campaign that encourages consumers to vote for their favorite energies at the ballot box, not only at the pump. Hansen, in fact, is mad at the free society where buyers voluntarily buy and sellers voluntarily sell. Ludwig von Mises called that consumer sovereignty.
Hansen wants otherwise. Renewables as savior is for the Tooth Fairy, he believes, so nuclear and forced conservation (conservationism) is atop his agenda — forced by a punitive carbon tax (or fee-and-dividend as he puts it).…
“With the RFF moment at hand, it is timely to give voice to the old Jerry Taylor to challenge the new Jerry.”
Will Jerry Taylor speak truth to power or power to truth at tomorrow’s seminar at Resources for the Future (RFF) on public policy toward climate change? This question was asked in yesterday’s post on the (ultra-strange) reinvention of Jerry Taylor to climate alarmism/forced energy transformation.
With the RFF moment at hand, it is timely to give voice to the old Jerry Taylor to challenge the new Jerry. These same questions should be asked of Ray Kopp, who has made a living of assuming rather than debating the fundamental issues surrounding climate change. And to the extent that RFF is a scholarly organization (it is not when it comes to climate change under the very partisan Phil Sharp), every staffer there should take the questions to heart and challenge authority.…
“Will Jerry Taylor speak truth to power by frontally questioning that carbon dioxide emissions is an unambiguous negative externality–a global market failure–that government, every government, must address? Or will he speak power to truth by assuming CO2 is a pollutant for which global government (really, an environmental Pope) can provide, as it were, a giant climate safety net.”
In 1998, then climate realist and energy libertarian Jerry Taylor wrote a piece, “Global Warming: The Anatomy of a Debate,” that piggybacked on the late, great Public Choice economist William Niskanen.
Taylor wrote:
…The national debate over what to do, if anything, about the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has become less a debate about scientific or economic issues than an exercise in political theater. The reason is that the issue of global climate change is pregnant with far-reaching implications for human society and the kind of world our children will live in decades from now.