… Continue Reading“In the long run, [government] subsidies can stifle technological progress and retard true commercialization. If state-of-the art technologies find a market, some of the private incentive for further improvement is dissipated. The acceptable becomes the enemy of the better, because individual firms come to have a stake in present technology. Minor improvements will be made to stay ahead of the competition, but there is little motivation toward major steps away from a successful line of business. Once a basic design is established, it also becomes more difficult for federal research and development managers to support radically different approaches to the same problem. There is fear of appearing foolish, hesitation in seeming to second-guess prior decisions, concern about upsetting investment in the operating technology, and pressure to satisfy competing demands for funds to support marginal improvements to current practice.”
For two years now, I’ve made a case that climate alarmism – which I define as the reflexive tendency to assume worst-case scenarios generated by climate models are true (and warrant public policy based on that belief) – is in a death spiral.
Climate alarmists, I documented, were losing their fight for legislation, regulation, and public opinion. It’s clear that I was right on at least two counts: nobody thinks legislation to control greenhouse gases is on the horizon, and President Obama won’t even talk about climate change, preferring to hide the ball in talk about “clean energy,” instead.
The public is also turning away: a new Gallup poll, conducted in 111 countries, found that fewer Europeans and Americans consider climate change a serious threat than they did before.…
Continue Reading[Editor note: Part I on energy conservationism examined Richard Nixon’s price control order of August 1971 as the birth of peacetime conservationism , with shortages leading to mandatory allocation law.]
A tract for the energy-shortage times was a 1976 essay in Foreign Affairs by Amory Lovins, the 29-year-old energy representative of the U.K. environmental group, Friends of the Earth. In “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Lovins coined the term soft energy paths to differentiate energy conservation and decentralized renewable technology from the “hard” path of central-station power plants fueled by oil, gas, coal, or uranium.
Neo-Malthusians such as Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren sang his praises, and the article became the most reprinted piece in the history of Foreign Affairs. Lovins was soon testifying before the U.S.…
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