“The Republicans are right — it’s a cap-and-tax bill. That’s what it is because they are raising revenue to do all sorts of things, especially to take care of the coal industry, and it makes no sense.”

– Tim Wirth, “Climate Bill ‘Out of Control,’ Former Senator Says,” Bloomberg,  August 18, 2009.

“Trading of rights to pollute … introduces speculation and makes millionaires on Wall Street. I hope cap and trade doesn’t pass, because we need a much more effective approach.”

–  Remarks of James Hansen, 350 Climate Conference, Columbia University, May 4, 2009 [Speech writeup in Appendix below]

Left commentators are interpreting what has gone wrong with the Obama healthcare plan. One explanation is the sheer complexity of the legislation. “[Obama] had a near-Depression to deal with, and a banking crisis of mammoth proportions,” stated MSNBC’s Howard Fineman.…

There is that old saying–when you dig yourself into a hole, stop digging! Joe Romm at the influential climate blog Climate Progress continues to dig deeper in his spat with Roger Pielke, Jr., who is seen by Left and Right as a straight-shooter in the polarized climate debate.

This is an instance where bad behavior by Romm is backfiring on him and his sponsor, the Center for American Progress (CAP).

Pielke’s post, “Please Read Climate Progress” (July 31) begins:

It’d sure be nice if people who disagree could debate policy questions based on the merits of the issue. Of course, this is not reality. I have been amused to see Joe Romm … find himself unable to respond to the policy arguments that I make, and thus find himself having to instead engage in ever more shrill and personal attacks on me.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act, better known as the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill, has been shown to be completely ineffective at slowing the rise in global temperature that is projected by climate models to accompany mankind’s continued reliance on fossil fuels for energy production. And this, despite the bill’s mandated cut-back of U.S. greenhouse gases emissions by a whopping 83% below 2005’s levels by the year 2050. As the primary purpose of the bill is to mitigate “global warming” and any follow-on impacts, Waxman-Markey, on its own, would seem an abject failure.

If you need any more proof, consider the bill’s effect on projected sea level rise. Recall that the specter of rapid sea level rise is one of the pillars of alarmist claims for impending climate catastrophe and calls for immediate action.…

MasterResource, the world’s premier free-market energy blog, began the day after Christmas and is seven months old. Views of 50,000 in our first quarter have been followed by 100,000 in the second quarter. Viewership near one thousand per day is not bad for a scholarly start-up–and much growth potential remains.

Our Model

We are a group blog on the very important and wide topic of energy, including climate change, which is all about energy. Our bloggers come from a variety of institutions, nonprofit and for-profit. We have backgrounds in political economy, economics, environmental studies, philosophy, and engineering. We are thinker-doers who are open-minded and part of a challenge culture. No smartest-guys-in-the-room problem here.

In the increasingly crowded blogosphere, there will be a flight to quality to group blogs that have a clear theme.…