The good news: Joe Romm has gone quiet (last post: June 26th) at ClimateProgress after a 14-year run as founder/chief blogger. The bad news: he has launched a new venture in the hopes of raising his profile and reach.

He has his work cut out for him. This irritable, emotional physicist-turned-journalist has long turned off conservatives, libertarians, and open-minded independents with his exaggerations (Wiki: ” Romm’s 2006 book Hell and High Water projects that humans have a window of opportunity of only about a decade to head off the most catastrophic effects of global warming”).

He has remained vitriolic and stubborn in the face of contrary evidence regarding dilute, intermittent energies, not to mention his notion of an unlivable climate. He will not engage in open debate with his critics–but likes to work behind the scenes to bully and discredit them.…

“Add [to rent-seeking] the company’s rank imprudence and strategic deceit (what I labeled philosophic fraud), and a new term had to be invented to describe that which true capitalist luminaries from Adam Smith forward warned against: the contra-capitalist corporation.”

For many years now, as a poor man’s Robert Caro, I have labored to demonstrate that the worldview-testing event called Enron was Exhibit A of crony capitalism and Progressivism, not free-market capitalism and the classical liberalism.

The Progressive mainstream argued emphatically for their conclusion. Two examples are among my favorites. Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.” Robert Kuttner in BusinessWeek: “Defenders of deregulation are mounting a heroic effort to insist that the [Enron] debacle was merely a business model gone bad, not an impeachment of freer markets”.…

“The danger is not a physically changed climate, natural or manmade. The real threat is wealth-destroying climate policies that would leave populations vulnerable to weather and climate from any direction and for whatever reason.”

“Climate alarmists operate like the ‘Borg Collective,’ whereas organizing free-market advocates is like cat herding. We could stand for a little more organization. Perhaps we can start by sharing and fine-tuning our GND energy cost estimates. Any suggestions would be appreciated.”

Various estimates have been made of the sizeable costs of the Green New Deal (GND), a proposal to forcefully move Americans away from the most affordable, reliable energies to so-called “clean” energies.

This post reassesses these costs with a plea to better coordinate economic analyses in order to counter the climate campaigners who demote economics and realism with end-is-near, last-chance alarm.…

“ICCC-13 will serve as a roadmap for further Trump administration efforts regarding climate science and policy, as well as highlight the voluminous scientific evidence that humans are not creating a climate crisis.”

– James Taylor, Conference organizer, 13th International Conference on Climate Change, Washington, DC: July 25, 2019.

Climate conferences by the Heartland Institute once could be dismissed by the alarmist mainstream as fringe affairs. But with President’s Trump withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, as well as the US-led boom in oil and natural gas production, the Obama-era “keep it in the ground” philosophy is in full retreat.

Political problems aside, climate alarmism is in intellectual trouble, as dire forecast after forecast proves exaggerated, and false scares come and go. And those romantic energy transformation predictions? The reality of dilute, intermittent energies is little energy and growing grass roots complaints.…