A Free-Market Energy Blog

Rhode Island’s Climate Lawsuit: On Thin Ice

By -- July 12, 2018

“While assessing the details of the Rhode Island lawsuit, we went back and read the prospectus for the state’s latest bond offering, dated April 3, 2018. Nowhere in the 25-page section on the economics of Rhode Island was there mention of economic risk from the climate damages the state alleges.”

“‘Send money’ seems to be the message. We wondered how the Defendants could stop from committing the acts they are accused of without stopping their sales of oil and gas products in the state. That would send the state back to an economy and society when Roger Williams founded Rhode Island.”

From sea to shining sea, the climate change movement is cranking up its legal actions against oil companies. The latest comes from the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantation.

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“The Ideology of Fossil Fuels” (Deep Ecology/Malthusian/ Postmodern/Totalitarian Thought Today)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 11, 2018

“Imagining a low-carbon world, then, means reevaluating our conception of freedom itself.”

– Audrea Lim, “The Ideology of Fossil Fuels.” Dissent, Spring 2018.

Audrea Lim in a recent issue of Dissent (a quarterly magazine for Left Progressivism) penned an essay, “The Ideology of Fossil Fuels.” The journalist/editor at Verso Books offers a rather bizarre view of the energy world. She writes in part:

Why is it so much easier, as the saying goes, to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? …. The most straightforward answer to the question, perhaps, lies in the sticky substance that fuels capitalism as we know it, and is daily bringing us closer to the apocalypse of the [doomsday] preppers’ imagination: oil.

“The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use,” writes the postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty in a seminal essay collected in Energy Humanities.

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‘Sense of Congress’ Resolution on a Carbon Tax (parsing the argument)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 10, 2018

“The last thing American families need is for our nation’s lawmakers to put our economy in reverse by enacting a national carbon tax.”

“A ‘carbon dividend’ is simply wealth redistribution by another name. And history is littered with the economic casualties wrought by heavy-handed government interference in the marketplace.”

Yesterday, a group of free-market, classical-liberal/libertarian, conservative groups sent a letter to The Honorable Paul Ryan (Speaker, U.S. House of Representatives) and The Honorable Kevin McCarthy (Majority Leader, U.S. House of Representatives) asking for consideration on H.Con.Res. 119, “express[ing] the sense of Congress that a carbon tax would be detrimental to American families and businesses and is not in the best interest of the United States.”

The letter follows (in red), with inserted comments by me.

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A carbon tax is a policy with one definable goal: to raise the cost of traditional, reliable, affordable sources of energy. 

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Energy & Environmental Newsletter: July 9, 2018

By -- July 9, 2018
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“An Orchestrated Campaign” (behind those climate lawsuits)

By Spencer Walrath -- July 5, 2018
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Climate/Energy Statism: An Inside Conversation (Part II)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 3, 2018
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Climate/Energy Statism: An Inside Conversation (Part I: pre-Trump plans that went awry)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 2, 2018
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Paris Lives! “Deep Decarbonization” at DOE

By -- June 28, 2018
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Protesters Aren’t Stopping US Pipeline Network Growth

By Steve Goreham -- June 27, 2018
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“Obama’s Global-Warming Folly” (Krauthammer lives!)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- June 26, 2018
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