“Climate change can seem like such a huge and intractable problem, its causes so beyond our control, that it’s easy to throw up your hands and say, “There’s not much I can do about it.” It seems like we’re always being told that no matter what steps are taken, it’s not enough.”
– Anastasia Pantsios, “MIT Crowdsourcing Project Asks for Your Help in Solving Climate Crisis,” EcoWatch, April 3, 2015.
Anastasia Pantsios has unwittingly described one of the major problems of the climate crusade–so little temperature effect from so much activism. But policy activism (carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, command-and-control) is actually bad climate policy because it allows weather/climate to impose its greatest costs on the human condition.
Public policy towards the climate-change issue should begin – and end – with reforms that make sense in their own right; that is, ‘win-win’ initiatives that reduce emissions but do not hurt energy consumers or taxpayers.…
“Even in flush economic times, carbon taxes would be bad policy. When economies are already laboring under too much spending and are at diminishing-return levels of taxation, implementing a carbon tax would be a mistake.”
– Kenneth Green, Dissecting the Carbon Tax, The American, July 13, 2012.
Open-mindedness is a mark of scholarship. And some great lights of classical-liberal social thought in the 20th century changed their minds for theoretical/empirical reasons from a utilitarian perspective.
F. A. Hayek began as a democratic socialist. Milton Friedman started as a FDR New Dealer and Keynesian. [1] Friedman later in life even moved away from his (naive) view of a fixed-monetary rule where, as he once put it, a computer program could manage the money supply. [2] Turns out that ‘money supply’ is not a fixed, known quantity; turns out that money is a government monopoly subject to politics.…
“Far exceeding the legal authority that Congress has delegated to the EPA, this power plan would set the U.S. on an even more aggressive path to reduce CO2 than has been taken by some European countries where electric prices are two to three times higher than the average U.S. rate.”
– Kathleen Hartnett White, Texas Public Policy Foundation (May 7, 2015)
Congratulations to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) for congratulating Texas political leaders for standing firm–and mighty tall–against climate alarmism mandated from Washington, DC. Obama might be high in the saddle right now, and the spin-science-Left might be tossing climate anger at realistic science, but the voting public isn’t buying it. Abbott, Cornyn, and Cruz are playing a winning intellectual and political hand alongside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.…