[Editor Note: In time for Global Divestment Day, MasterResource is pleased to reproduce this letter to Stanford University president John Hennessy from Kathleen Hartnett-White, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Dated May 30, 2014, this letter remains highly relevant today. (Ms. Hartnett-White is speaking tonight at the sold-out event at the University of Houston, “Private Profit vs. Public Good: Do Energy Companies Have a Social Responsibility?“)
“Stanford’s decision to divest in coal is a symbol for the elite that regrettably reflects indifference to the poor across the world who have never seen a light switch.”
Dear President Hennessy,
I am an Honors graduate of Stanford holding B.A. and M.A. degrees in the Humanities and served as Chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) for six years.…
Continue Reading“Each of the complex climate models used by the IPCC grossly overstates the amount of warming the planet has experienced during the past 120 or so years. In addition, based on the idea that temperatures should rise right along with CO2 emissions, these models have missed the entire 18+ year hiatus in rising temperatures.”
In early January, the noted science journal Science Bulletin published a paper by Lord Christopher Monckton; Astrophysicist Willie Soon, Ph.D.: climatologist and geologist David Legates, Ph.D.; and statistician William Briggs, “Why Models Run Hot: Results from an Irreducibly Simple Climate Model,” which introduced a new, simple model of the climate’s response to adding CO2 to the atmosphere. Their model outperformed the complex climate models used by the IPCC to project future temperatures and temperature trends.…
Continue Reading“The benefits of allowing the free market in oil and gasoline to operate, particularly in the moment as opposed to several months or a year down the road, are not only diffuse and widespread but cannot be directly compared to the immediate, concentrated, and highly visible costs being realized in the oil industry. In fact, most of these benefits have yet to occur.”
There is a proposition in public choice economics called the special interest effect. It basically argues that government grows because, for most government programs, there are concentrated beneficiaries and diffused cost bearers. What this means is that the benefits of government programs will fall on relatively small, easily definable and therefore organizable groups, i.e. special interests, while the costs will be thinly spread across the population as a whole.…
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