“We need to defeat climate deniers like Ann Marie Buerkle and Dan Benishek to restore the place of science on Capitol Hill.”
– Gene Karpinski, president, League of Conservation Voters, quoted in Jennifer Yachnin, “Enviros Target Climate Deniers in Latest Ad Campaign” (sub. req.) Greenwire, July 24, 2012.
All but the most impartial and inflammatory participants in the climate-change debate disdain the term “denier” to characterize so-called climate-change skeptics. Climatologist Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, has complained:
…Somebody needs to research the sociology and psychology of people that insist that anyone that does not accept [anthropogenic global warming] as a rationale for massive CO2 mitigation efforts is a “denier.” The complexity of skepticism (ranging from multiple aspects of the science, to the impacts that can be attributable to AGW and whether or not they are “dangerous” to the policies proposed for CO2 mitigation) seems to be completely missed by all of the “scholars” writing articles about ‘deniers’.
“EPA’s politically appointed leadership believes that the perversion of science is a ‘minor evil’ committed to achieve the ‘greater good’ of ridding the nation of coal-fired power generation. Science may be the first casualty in the EPA’s war on coal, but all of us are its victims.”
– Robert Peltier, “MACT Attack,” POWER, July 2012, p. 6.
Robert Peltier is no ordinary participant in today’s important energy debates. He is editor-in-chief of POWER magazine, which covers all technologies relating to electricity. He is a professional engineer with a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Peltier in a previous life was a tenured professor. He has worked in manufacturing and for a public utility. And before that, he was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy.
It is his job to study the technological possibilities with an eye to competitive viability in electric generation.…
“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.…