Climate Alarmism: Our Sanity and Wallets Need a Break

By -- September 15, 2012 16 Comments

“Is there any more single-minded, simple pleasure than viewing with alarm? At times it is even better than sex.”

—Kenneth Boulding (1970), p. 160. [1]

Pick up any 40-year-old science textbook – on chemistry, biology, geology, physics, astronomy or medicine – and you’ll find a slew of “facts” and theories that have been proven wrong or are no longer the “consensus” view. Climatology is no exception.

Yesterday’s  Cooling Scare

Back in the 1970s, many scientists warned of global cooling – and fretted that a new ice age brought on by fossil fuel use would cause glaciers to expand, wreaking havoc. They predicted every conceivable disaster, short of roving herds of wooly mammoths stampeding through ice-covered streets. (The possibility of cloning a well-preserved mammoth could buttress the next scary ice age scenario.)

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Sierra Club Energy: Beyond Affordable

By Lance Brown -- September 12, 2012 4 Comments

The Sierra Club’s war on coal, since joined by its war on gas, is really a conflict against industrial progress. Reliable, affordable energy is a ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, and the enemy has wanted to take it ever since Paul Ehrlich et al. got going in the 1960s and 1970s.

The irony is that an honest Sierra Club executive back in the 1980s gave windpower its most infamous nickname, the Cuisinarts of the Air. Sierra Club members have resigned over the organization’s pro-wind policy, and grassroot environmentalists have tasted wind only to spit it out (here and here). And the Old Mare refuses to address devastating criticism about industrial wind, such as from Jon Boone here at MasterResource. [1]

Many examples of Sierra Club policy against environmentally superior dense energy can be chronicled.

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Energy at ALEC: Response to Media Matters

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 13, 2012 4 Comments

I expected the worst when I saw that Media Matters, the communications watchdog for the Democratic Left,  had profiled my recent energy speech given to 1,000-strong at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) annual meeting. Still, I think it useful to rebut Media Matters’s Alexander Zaitchik whose report is reproduced with my parsed comments in blue.

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MM: The agenda in Salt Lake City was heavy on energy themes. Keynoting one of the luncheons was Robert Bradley, CEO of the free-market and pro-climate change Institute for Energy Research.

Comment:   “Free market” is an apt term–thank you, Sir. But “pro-climate change? I have never heard that. That tricky to equate climate change with the human influence on climate, as if natural forces were not also at work.

In rebuttal, I’ll just quote James Hansen on climate change:

“Climate is always changing.

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Milton Friedman's 100th: Exploring His Wisdom for the Ages (Part II: Energy)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 2, 2012 5 Comments

[Ed. note: Milton Friedman’s views are also explored in Part I of this series (worldview) and in Part III (political capitalism).]

“Economists may not know much. But we know one thing very well: how to produce surpluses and shortages. Do you want a surplus? Have the government legislate a minimum price that is above the price that would otherwise prevail…. Do you want a shortage? Have the government legislate a maximum price that is below the price that would otherwise prevail.”

– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 219.

“It is a mark of how far we have gone on the road to serfdom that government allocation and rationing of oil is the automatic response to the oil crisis.”

– Milton Friedman, “Why Some Prices Should Rise,” Newsweek, November 19, 1973.

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New Science Endangers EPA’s “Endangerment Finding"

By Chip Knappenberger -- July 12, 2012 8 Comments Continue Reading

Pandora's NAAQS: CEI Comments on U.S. EPA's 'Carbon Pollution Standard'

By -- June 26, 2012 6 Comments Continue Reading

"Nothing is more fungible than a good idea" (U.S. as global high-tech oil/gas leader)

By Steve Maley -- June 19, 2012 3 Comments Continue Reading

The Essential ‘Oil, Gas & Government’ (Kudos to a treatise in the age of the blog)

By -- May 25, 2012 5 Comments Continue Reading

Real World Economics (key to understanding real-world energy)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 18, 2012 No Comments Continue Reading

Star States on the Road to U.S. Hydrocarbon Plenty

By Julia Bell -- May 15, 2012 5 Comments Continue Reading