“Material insufficiency and environmental problems have their benefits, over and beyond the improvement which they invoke. They focus the attention of individuals and communities, and constitute a set of challenges which can bring out the best in people.”

– Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996), p. 587.

“We need our problems, though this does not imply that we should purposely create additional problems for ourselves.”

– Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996), p. 588.

The rains from Hurricane Harvey presented a worst-case event for Houston, Texas, and the petroleum/petrochemical capital of the United States. As such, a lesser known part of the Julian Simon (1932–1998) worldview of human progress comes into play.

Simon argued that there was a driving force or condition for human improvement beyond the institutional framework (private property, voluntary exchange, the rule of law), based on the human potential of motivation, effective use of knowledge, trial and error feedback, etc.…

“Will Ms. Lavelle admit that global lukewarming is a valid area of scientific inquiry and conclusion; there are benefits, not only costs, to the human influence on climate; and ‘government failure’ exists alongside ‘market failure’ in the quest to ‘do something’? Adaptation to realistic scenarios, private sector as well as public, is an alternative to–and opportunity cost of–mitigation.”

The article by Marianne Lavelle, “5 Shades of Climate Denial, All on Display in the Trump White House,” a feature at Instide Climate News (June 9, 2017), deserves a second look. The good news is that a much more useful categorization that has been offered (by Richard Mueller, below) can be used to correct the unstudied, biased five categories presented in ICN.

Here are Lavelle’s five categories:

1. “It’s Not Real”
2. “‘It’s Not Our Fault,’ and Other Lighter Shades”
3. “The Science Is Just Too Uncertain.

“When The Washington Post reported earlier this month that President Trump appointed Daniel Simmons to run the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the paper called him a ‘conservative scholar.’ Conservative scholar? ‘Fossil fuel industry propagandist’ would have been more accurate.”

– Elliott Negin (Senior Writer, Union of Concerned Scientists). “Can Trump’s Koch-Funded Appointees STall Clean Energy Momentum?” May 19, 2017.

Editor note: This responds to Professor Dolan’s post yesterday, “Hayek and a Carbon Tax: Response to Bradley, which answered Bradley’s post two days ago, “Hayek was not a Malthusian or Global Tariff Advocate (link to a carbon tax peculiar, errant).” The debate began with Dolan’s original piece, “Friedrich Hayek on Carbon Taxes.”

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“… let’s add the ‘fat tail’ of the global CO2 blanket protecting against a little ice age or an ice age in the next several hundred years. Why not think of global lukewarming as a short-term positive, and the CO2 blanket as a long-term positive?”

“Classical liberals should be focused on adaptation to climate change, natural or anthropogenic, which is wealth-as-health and free movements of goods and services and people.