“Climate change can seem like such a huge and intractable problem, its causes so beyond our control, that it’s easy to throw up your hands and say, “There’s not much I can do about it.” It seems like we’re always being told that no matter what steps are taken, it’s not enough.”
– Anastasia Pantsios, “MIT Crowdsourcing Project Asks for Your Help in Solving Climate Crisis,” EcoWatch, April 3, 2015.
Anastasia Pantsios has unwittingly described one of the major problems of the climate crusade–so little temperature effect from so much activism. But policy activism (carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, command-and-control) is actually bad climate policy because it allows weather/climate to impose its greatest costs on the human condition.
Public policy towards the climate-change issue should begin – and end – with reforms that make sense in their own right; that is, ‘win-win’ initiatives that reduce emissions but do not hurt energy consumers or taxpayers.…
Continue Reading“The man of system … is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it…. [H]e seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.”
– Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).
A recent video is circulating where T. Boone Pickens ranted “I am the expert, not you” to land his point that falling demand, not increasing supply, is primarily behind the oil-price collapse. This outburst reminds me of the quote from the early 20th century humorist Peter Finley Dunne: “It’s not so much what he doesn’t know that worries me, as what he does know that isn’t so.”…
Continue Reading“I have observed natural resource hearings for four decades. Never has such a pervasive, activist, elitist, anti-civilization mentality so pervaded our society as that on display at this hearing.”
Earlier this week, a hearing was held by the Seattle Port Authority about the impending arrival of Shell Oil’s offshore drilling equipment, which needs a docking for its Arctic mission this season. The hearing room was packed past overflow for what turned out to be a five-hour debate.
The result will not stop Shell from arriving at Terminal 5, although four of the five commissioners asked for delays as supported by Seattle Mayor Ed Murray. A summary of the testimony from a pro-energy, pro-Alaska perspective follows.
Alaska Witnesses
Many testified. All but one (i.e. a Mat-su area environmentalist who criticized Alaska’s position on natural resource development) represented themselves professionally, presenting actual facts and history relating to the century-old relationship between Seattle and Alaska.…
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