The alarmists’ attitude towards climate change will prove more harmful than beneficial in the long run.
Earth Day this year focused officially on the need to reduce plastic litter, a worthy and achievable goal. Nonetheless, much Earth Day activity concentrated on the alleged need to save the planet from climate change.
Climate-change alarmists have long called the current warming period “unprecedented” and “dangerous.” But is it?
Ironically, this Earth Day fell in the midst of one of the coldest Aprils in North American history. The severe winter of 2017–2018 has raised debates from two contrasting ends.
While some uninformed people claim it disproves global warming, climate alarmists claim it is just another evidence for global warming.
Deniers, Alarmists and Skeptics
Actual climate-change deniers—and they are very few—categorically deny the warming trend.…
Continue Reading“When President Reagan decontrolled prices in January 1981, the regulatory arbitrage was over…. The strangest regulatory episode in US history was done.”
Economist Robert Murphy has summarized what I believe is the most unique, confounding, consequential regulatory episode in American history in his piece: “The Crazy Crude Oil Price Controls of the 1970s.” [1]
Yes, it happened some decades ago. But if you want to know why no economist in recent history has espoused price controls for crude oil and petroleum products, this experience rings loud today.
Basically, a large group of opportunistic middlemen seized profits that federal price and allocation regulation kept from the rightful industry parties (wellhead producers, in particular). It is the story of the unintended consequences of government intervention. Or entrepreneurial gaming in the face of regulatory constraints (with positive social outcomes in this case)–what Israel Kirzner called superfluous entrepreneurship.…
Continue Reading“Thousands of years of climate adaptation by untold numbers of biological species is now viewed by climate alarmists as an obsolete process, as they assume that the global climate environment has reached its ultimate optimum state of ‘now’.”
The most recent rebuttal by Rob Bradley to a “Climate Alarmist at R Street” included reference to “change” as a primal fear among the environmental alarmists. Stasis, indeed, is a defining characteristic of the Malthusian, deep ecology worldview held by many natural scientists working in academia.
Inherent in our earthly existence is change. Change characterizes all physical entities on some time scale. Order succumbs to disorder, unless work is expended to mitigate it, at least according to the law of entropy. Yet climate is held to a pseudo-spiritual standard of enduring timelessness and unchanging behavior.…
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