“Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the [twentieth] century.”

– John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich (1971) [1]

Doom and gloom—repeatedly falsified—hallmark the long career of John P. Holdren, neo-Malthusian and President Obama’s start-to-finish science advisor. Back at Harvard University, the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy has been been quiet. He avoided making specific, apocalyptic predictions during his Obama years (January 2009– January 2017) and has rarely made the news since. But his many written and spoken statements beginning in the 1970s, never disowned, remain for the record.

Today is a good time to refresh memories of the man who just might be the scariest man in Boston/Cape Cod on this day.

Read—but don’t be frightened.…

“[I]t is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the extraordinary polymath Sir David MacKay pointed out, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables.”

– Matt Ridley, “Wind is an Irrelevance to the Energy and Climate Debate“(May 15, 2017)

An op-ed and blog post several months ago by Matt Ridley is still making the rounds. A great thinker, Ridley gets to the essence of things. He is hard to ignore, even by his critics. Ridley’s book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010), is a seminal contribution in the Julian Simon tradition. (His other work can be found here.)

Here are some salient excerpts from his op-ed/post:

“[Wind power’s] contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

“I think [Julian Simon] probably should have been considered for a Nobel Prize.  He took a very independent position with little backing, dug deep and provided very good evidence for his predictions and expectations.”

“I do not believe there is a natural resource economics.  I believe there is good economics and bad economics.”

• Milton Friedman (below)

Editor note: Milton Friedman would be 105 this day. Born July 31, 1912, in New York City, he died on November 16, 2006, in San Francisco, age 94.

Reprinted below is an exchange between Robert Bradley Jr. and the Milton Friedman when the Nobel Laureate was 91 years old–a testament to the patience, scholarship, and longevity of one of the greatest social thinkers of modern time.

Editor note: This responds to Professor Dolan’s post yesterday, “Hayek and a Carbon Tax: Response to Bradley, which answered Bradley’s post two days ago, “Hayek was not a Malthusian or Global Tariff Advocate (link to a carbon tax peculiar, errant).” The debate began with Dolan’s original piece, “Friedrich Hayek on Carbon Taxes.”

———————–

“… let’s add the ‘fat tail’ of the global CO2 blanket protecting against a little ice age or an ice age in the next several hundred years. Why not think of global lukewarming as a short-term positive, and the CO2 blanket as a long-term positive?”

“Classical liberals should be focused on adaptation to climate change, natural or anthropogenic, which is wealth-as-health and free movements of goods and services and people.