“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children. It has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate.’”

     – Joe Romm, quoted in Thomas Friedman, Is the Inflection Point Near?, New York Times, March 7, 2009.

“Is there any more single-minded, simple pleasure than viewing with alarm? At times it is even better than sex.”

    —Kenneth Boulding (1970), p. 160. [1]

I know…. We free-market optimists–and we ObamaCare, ObamaEnergy, etc. pessimists–are like the chap who jumps off the skyscraper and reports that everything is breezy on the way down.

But we have been jumping off buildings ever since Robert Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on Population was published in 1798.…

Seven Southeastern states have rejected renewable energy mandates and/or voluntary alternative energy quotas on electric companies: Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. (North Carolina is another story, requiring a 10% share for renewables and mandated efficiency savings by 2018.)

The good news for the seven states is not only that unnecessary costs have been avoided during the political boom of ‘green’ energy. The benefit is also that artificial bubble jobs are not on a death watch as they are in other states that now face ‘green’-energy retrenchment.

Bad Wind

William Yeatman, an energy policy analyst for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, contends that Southeastern states do not have as much renewable energy potential as the rest of the country. “The Southeast has the lowest wind energy potential of all regions, and wind is the energy source that is used to achieve virtually all renewable electricity mandates in the U.S.”…

MasterResource is home to a growing number of grassroot environmentalists who are challenging the Washington, D.C. establishment to reconsider industrial wind turbines. Jen Gilbert’s Dear Sierra Club (Canada): I Resign Over Your Anti-Environmental Wind Support and Jon Boone’s three-part The Sierra Club: How Support for Industrial Wind Technology Subverts Its History, Betrays Its Mission, and Erodes Commitment to the Scientific Method of what Robert Bradley has summarized in his post, Windpower: Environmentalists vs. Environmentalists (NIMBYism, precautionary principle vs. industrial wind). 

My piece for National Review (reprinted below) looks at the bigger picture of how reasoned criticism and intellectual diversity have struggled to penetrate the environmental mainstream. The result of such intolerance has been Faustian bargains such as the Sierra Club going all-in for wind power (see their response to Robert Bryce’s recent op-edin the New York Times).…

“The interventionist in advocating additional public expenditure is not aware of the fact that the funds available are limited. He does not realize that increasing expenditure in one department enjoins restricting it in other departments. In his opinion there is plenty of money available. The income and wealth of the rich can be freely tapped…. It never occurs to him [think Obama] that grave arguments could be advanced in favor of restricting public spending and lowering the burden of taxation. The champions of cuts in the budget are in his eyes merely the defenders of the manifestly unfair class interests of the rich.”

– Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949), 1966, pp. 856–57.

“This is where we stand in our current debt ceiling debate. Government is too big, too bloated.