“Jerry Taylor, in effect, faked his intellectual death to collect the insurance money. He founded a ‘libertarian’ think tank advocating open-ended climate/energy statism…. For his deceit, Taylor has gained power, attention, and pecuniary reward. And he has exacted his revenge on the Kochs (really classical liberalism) for their reform effort at Cato.”
[NOTE: This completes my two-part series on the fake conversion of Jerry Taylor. Part I was yesterday.]
Despite decades in the intellectual trenches, he is the author of no books and few scholarly articles. He holds no academic degree, having left college after some controversy, never to return. [1] He did his analysis on the fly (board game design was a competing passion, unlike the off-the-clock policy wonk).
But with beaucoup smarts, fire, superior articulation (written and verbal), a reliable worldview, and access to top thinkers and researchers, he became a first-rate public-policy intellectual and a sort of a Mr.…
For anyone worried about climate change, Jerry Taylor is an intriguing figure. He “spent years as a professional climate denier at the Cato Institute, arguing against climate science, regulations, and treaties in op-eds, speeches, and media appearances”… But then Taylor began to change his mind…. [David Leonhardt (New York Times), “Conservatives for the Climate.” April 25, 2019]
[NOTE: This begins my two-part series on the fake conversion of Jerry Taylor. Part II is tomorrow.]
Yesterday’s post described two columnists at the New York Times, Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat, who have editorialized against climate alarmism. In a debate/discussion with Douthat, fellow columnist David Leonhardt highlighted the conversion experience of Jerry Taylor, founder and head of the Niskanen Center, which advertises itself as “Improving Policy, Advancing Liberty.”…
Joe Romm, founder of ClimateProgress (now part of ThinkProgress) at the Center for American Progress, is the bully man against anyone daring to challenge the narrative of man-made climate peril and the affordability of government-forced transformation away from mineral (dense) energies.
His ire has included two editorialists at the New York Times who are not buying climate catastrophe–Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat. But with the losing politics of carbon dioxide (CO2) rationing, not to mention the open scientific questions of climate sensitivity, these two opinion-molders have the high ground.
Bret Stephens
Romm lambasted the Times in 2017 for hiring “extreme climate science denier” Bret Stephens, a characterization that brought rebuke from the Washington Post and other Left outlets. [1]
Most recently, Romm complained about Stephens’s interpretation of Nancy Pelosi’s rejection of the Green New Deal as incrementalism.…