https://niskanencenter.org/blog/last-week-trump-kneecapped-conservative-climate-policy/
“Republicans have gone from measured resistance to climate action into total, unreasoning incoherence.”
“There are Republicans who know better, but they’ve been cowed into silence while their party drifts ever further into madness.”
Jerry Taylor, “Last Week, Trump Kneecapped Conservative Climate Policy.”
Lost in the firestorm that followed last week’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement is the arresting display of intellectual meltdown within the GOP. Republicans—with Trump at the helm—are gleefully blowing up an agreement that was everything they have long said they wanted out of international climate talks. They are likewise shredding Obama-era compliance plans that are anchored in everything conservatives still say they want out of domestic environmental policy. Republicans have gone from measured resistance to climate action into total, unreasoning incoherence.
The Republican battle cry in the 1990s and 2000s was that no U.S.…
Continue Reading“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.
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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. …
Continue Reading“For this treaty to merit our support, the proponents should be asked to demonstrate the accuracy of all of the following statements…. As will be seen below, the case for any one of these statements is surprisingly weak. The case for a global warming treaty, which depends on the accuracy of all of these statements, in shockingly weak.”
– William Niskanen, Fall 1997
“Given the low cost of waiting, it would seem only prudent to continue to try to answer the open questions about climate change before making major changes to Western civilization.”
– Jerry Taylor on Niskanen (above), Winter 1998
In the Fall 1997 issue of JOBS & CAPITAL (Milken Institute), William A. Niskanen, chair of the Cato Institute, published a long essay against regulating carbon dioxide (CO2) via a global treaty (or otherwise).…
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