Editor note: Professor Dolan kindly submitted this rebuttal to Robert Bradley’s post yesterday, “Hayek was not a Malthusian or Global Tariff Advocate (link to a carbon tax peculiar, errant).” Bradley’s post, in turn, was a critique of Dolan’s original piece, “Friedrich Hayek on Carbon Taxes.”

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I am happy to comment on the validity of the nine points you raise regarding Hayek and a carbon tax.

1. Hayek was suspicious of scientific ‘consensus,’ given the consensus of Keynesianism and central planning in his lifetime.

I agree with what you say about Hayek’s attitude toward the Keynesian consensus. However, my reading is that he distinguished between social sciences and natural sciences, and between the ability of people to offer informed judgement on fields in which they have specific expert training compared with fields in which they do not have such training.…

“‘An inability to tolerate views different’? ‘Rage reactions’? Can we apply this mental health standard to Joe Romm and James Hansen, not to mention Paul Ehrlich in his diatribes against Julian Simon?”

“This is ironic to those of us who have encountered angry neo-Malthusians trying to wake us up to the coming food famine (1960s warnings), resource famine (1970s warnings), and, most recently, climate alarmism. Does this standard apply to them as it does to all things Trump?”

I have resubscribed to the New York Times. I received a 50 percent discount, and with Trump’s upset win in November I wanted to better understand what the intellectual/media elite were thinking. (And the answer is … they still don’t get it.)

In the Letters section of February 14th edition, I encountered “Mental Health Professionals Warn About Trump.”…

The Institute for Energy Research (IER) and its advocacy arm, the American Energy Alliance (AEA), are in the news.

As reported last month in the Los Angeles Times, and more recently in Bloomberg Politics, IER/AEA are involved in the free-market directions that the president-elect and his team have followed to date.

One account described the founding of IER as follows:

The Institute for Energy Research was founded to be a clearinghouse for energy information in 1989 in Houston by Robert L. Bradley Jr., a speechwriter for Enron chief executive Kenneth Lay, who was later convicted of securities fraud.

Given that this association is part of the political conversation (Joe Romm started it in 2009: see below), and the continuing attention that is ahead for IER/AEA, I wish to revisit the historical record about my time at Enron that overlapped with IER.…

Editor Note: The post below, published at MasterResource in June 2009, has profound challenges for the notion that self-interested business underinvests in energy efficiency, giving a “market failure” rationale for government investments in and mandates for energy efficiency. This post introduced the term conservationism to differentiate government conservation from market conservation. It also documents the market failure of Joe Romm’s shuttered nonprofit, the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions.

“Enter the energy outsourcing model of energy service companies (ESCOs) in the 1990s, widely heralded as a ‘new economy’ breakthrough and a new feature of ‘natural capitalism’. Enron Energy Services (EES), in particular, the energy outsourcing division of the late Enron, was the next great thing…. ‘ESCOs are DEFINITELY the future,’ exclaimed Joe Romm. ‘I intend to work with the big ones to transform the market, which I think will take about two or three years.’