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.…
Continue Reading[Editor note: Part II on energy conservationism tomorrow examines the energy conservation faddism of Amory Lovins.]
Richard Nixon (1913–94) got on the wrong side of economic law three years before his Watergate-related resignation from the U.S. presidency. In August 1971, in a surprise decision, Nixon imposed the first peacetime wage-and-price controls in American history.
Businessmen reined in their surprise to pragmatically offer support. John Kenneth Galbraith and Paul Samuelson offered quick congratulations. There was public approval of the ‘temporary’ action that was intended to just quell inflationary expectations (as if the problem was psychological and not the inherent consequence of expansionary money). The inflation rate was then running at about 4 percent per year.
Free-market economist Milton Friedman, knowing that shortages lay ahead, lambasted the move. So did Ayn Rand in the Ayn Rand Letter.…
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