” … there are still numerous economic and societal barriers to rapid decarbonization.”

“And it is not like wind and solar come free of environmental concerns. The sheer size of wind and solar installations needed to underpin our electricity system is significant.”

“… lower income households will bear the largest relative burdens of the higher energy costs that are likely as a result of climate policies. While there are ways of mitigating these unequal impacts, they require difficult trade-offs.”

– Daniel Raimi and Alan Krupnick, “Decarbonization: It Ain’t That Easy, RFF Blog Post, April 20, 2018.

A recent blog post by Daniel Raimi and Alan Krupnick of Resources for the Future (RFF) is unusual, even remarkable, given the institutional history of their organization. For RFF in recent decades has gone Left, way Left, for the cause of climate alarmism/forced energy transformation (see here). …

[Editor note: This exchange at the R-Street Institute website (no longer visible) is posted here and here.]

“From the Club of Rome to the present–with scientific models and articles in Science magazine from the ‘consensus’–the verdict has been wrong, wrong, wrong, and trending wrong. And this is before even considering (non-libertarian) public policy of taxes, tariffs, equity adjustments, private/public cronyism, etc.”

So why have neo-Malthusian natural scientists been so incorrect for so long? We have nearly a half-century of (falsified) doom-and-gloom.

Josiah Neeley of R-Street, once a critic of climate alarmism and wind power (see yesterday), is now desperately trying to make a case to libertarians and conservatives that the climate is in crisis and a carbon tax (and all the global government that goes with it) is necessary.…

“China’s new strategy is to rely mostly on a switch from ‘dispersed coal’ to clean coal, bolstered by generous doses of natural gas and all of the above—and more natural gas storage.” (Xizhou Zhou)

Last month in conjunction with CERAWeek, the Wall Street Journal published a Special Advertising Feature by Xizhou Zhou, “How China’s Anti-Smog Campaign Triggered a Natural Gas Crisis and a Switch to ‘Clean Coal’,” (March 7, 2018).

It was an article that contradicted the mainstream media story about how China energy policy is all about going ‘green giant’ in renewable energy (such my criticism of Amy Myers Jaffe). Donn Dears, too, jumped on Zhou’s piece in “The Truth About Coal, China, and Smog.”)

Basically, China is going clean coal, as in applying modern pollution control technology to reduce real pollutants (CO2 is not a pollutant in the classic sense). …

“Michael Shellenberger needs to go Alex Epstein. He must explain the fundamental energy concepts of density and intermittency in his political quest in the Golden State…. He must differentiate between global lukewarming and catastrophic warming from the enhanced greenhouse effect. The war on fossil fuels must end in California.”

Michael Shellenberger, founder and president of Environmental Progress, is running for Governor of California. Energy is his major campaign issue for a state that is in energy trouble. But he must properly finish what he has started–even to the point of speaking political incorrectness to power.

“I am a lifelong Democrat and have worked for progressive causes all of my life.” So begins the “About” section of Michael Shellenberger’s website for his run for California’s governorship. A resident of Berkeley, he touts his credentials as a Progressive Democrat: