“Milton Friedman’s timeless energy insights should be appreciated for all time.”

Born on this day 106 years ago, free-market economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was one of a kind. Even the dyspeptic Paul Krugman called his rival “the economist’s economist…a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived.” The Economist (November 23, 2006) called him “the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century… and possibly all of it.”

Milton Friedman’s major professional mark was in monetary economics. But as a public intellectual, writing popular books and a biweekly Newsweek column, he became conversant in different fields, including energy.

Friedman understood how, for much of US history, major energy regulation was sponsored by some segment of the industry.…

“To the extent that the Gulf’s recapture of the dominant share of the global oil market will make price increases more likely, the U.S. economy is at risk…. Since 1970 sharp increases in the price of oil have always been followed by economic recessions in the United States.”

 – Charles Curtis and Joseph Romm, “Mideast Oil Forever?”  The Atlantic Monthly,  April 1996.

“This notion that the environmental movement — or any other major play in the media landscape — is pushing non-stop apocalyptic messages like a broken record is one I debunked ….”

– Joe Romm, “A Critique of the Broken-Record Counterfactual Message of the New York Times on Environmentalists and Scientists,” ThinkProgress,  April 29, 2012.

Joe Romm, the climate-alarmist doyen of ThinkProgress (Center for American Progress), has long been subject to rebuttal at MasterResource.…

“With my characteristic optimism, my 1997 paper on global warming remarked that ‘We should know a lot more about this issue in the next 10 to 20 years.’ Unfortunately, there has been a rush to judgement on this issue without a significant increase in the information on which to base this judgement.”

– William Niskanen, 2008

Part I yesterday presented the key questions regarding the climate-change issue from William Niskanen’s Fall 1997 symposium essay, “Too Much, Too Soon: Is a Global Warming Treaty a Rush to Judgment?” Part II today reprints a lead section from that essay, How Good is the Science of Global Warming? followed by Niskanen’s eleven-year retrospective. I conclude with a brief comment as a twenty-one year retrospective.

—————-

The current debate in the scientific community about global warming is based on only a few hard facts: The current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is nearly 30 percent higher than in pre-industrial times; the average (measured) global temperature has increased about 0.5°C since the 1880s; and the increased concentration of carbon dioxide may have contributed to the increase in temperature. …

[Note: This will be Niskanen Week with forthcoming posts on his views on climate-change science, economics, and public policy. This is particularly relevant with the contradictory policies of the Niskanen Center under its founder and head, Jerry Taylor.]