…“Donald Trump has been to climate regulation as General Sherman was to Atlanta,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the Columbia Law School, referring to the Union general who razed the city during the Civil War. “Hopefully it won’t take as long to rebuild.”
“We’ve lost very important time on climate change, which we can ill afford,” said Richard Newell, president of Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan energy and environment-focused research organization in Washington. “There is severe damage. To ignore climate for four years, you can’t put a price on that. It’s a huge issue that needs to be confronted with long-term momentum and extreme dedication, and we have lost that.”
Quoted in Coral Davenport, “What Will Trump’s Most Profound Legacy Be?
“Is the human environment better because of increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the usage of carbon-based energies? The answer is a resounding yes. That is triumphant news, whether the human influence on climate is net ‘bad’ or net ‘good’ by a physical, stasis metric.”
Statistics and history matter. Particularly when a shared narrative is contradicted by the interaction of man and nature.
A recent Facebook post by Bjørn Lomborg cannot be emphasized enough in this regard. Over the last century, climate-related deaths have plummeted as societal wealth has overcome the limits to nature. I am reminded of an Alex Epstein quotation, mirroring a major theme of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels:
…Nature doesn’t give us a stable, safe climate that we make dangerous. It gives us an ever-changing, dangerous climate that we need to make safe.
“Soon enough, citizens and voters will wise up to the false promises and cronyism of political energy. MasterResource will be an intellectual resource to help win the day for the master resource and the human ingenuity behind it.”
There is life outside of energy research and related public policy. I discovered some of it during the last ten days with limited responsibilities on the avocation/vocation front. But it is time to re-engage–and take time to look back and forward.
A Look Back
MasterResource, “a free market energy blog,” just turned twelve years old. In our inaugural post (December 26, 2008), I wrote:
…We are just getting started here, but some of us veterans of the energy debate from a private property, free-market perspective have teamed together to offer our thoughts on late breaking energy items.