Joe Romm, founder of ClimateProgress (now part of ThinkProgress) at the Center for American Progress, is the bully man against anyone daring to challenge the narrative of man-made climate peril and the affordability of government-forced transformation away from mineral (dense) energies.

His ire has included two editorialists at the New York Times who are not buying climate catastrophe–Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat. But with the losing politics of carbon dioxide (CO2) rationing, not to mention the open scientific questions of climate sensitivity, these two opinion-molders have the high ground.

Bret Stephens

Romm lambasted the Times in 2017 for hiring “extreme climate science denier” Bret Stephens, a characterization that brought rebuke from the Washington Post and other Left outlets. [1]

Most recently, Romm complained about Stephens’s interpretation of Nancy Pelosi’s rejection of the Green New Deal as incrementalism.…

“The nuclear industry has effectively priced itself out of the market for new power plants, at least in market-based economies. That’s why nuclear power’s share of global power generation has dropped to around 11 percent — its lowest level in decades.”

 – Joe Romm, ThinkProgress, February 4, 2019

As he periodically does, Joe Romm has again trashed nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels, claiming that wind power and solar power are cheaper, can access affordable batteries for overcome intermittency, and can be scaled to the quantities needed (wrong, wrong, and wrong–a story for another day).

In “Taxpayers Should Not Fund Bill Gates’ Nuclear Albatross,” Romm states:

The reality is that nuclear power is so uneconomical that existing U.S. nuclear power plants are bleeding cash — and in many places it’s now cheaper to build and run new wind or solar farms than to simply run an existing nuclear power plant.…

“Efforts to sell Republicans on the idea that [a CO2 price] is the most market-friendly approach to the emissions problem have failed miserably, and will continue to fail.”

– Justin Gillis, Forget the Carbon Tax for Now, New York Times, December 27, 2018.

Oh, how the free-market climate realists (science, economics, politics) feel vindicated. The mainstream press has (belatedly) announcing the Carbon Tax politically dead and a distraction for the whole climate debate.

The article by veteran New York Times writer Justin Gillis was one of (at least) three remarkable reality pieces inspired by the year-end UN climate conference (COP 24) in Katowice, Poland. The others were:

• Politico‘s Why Greens Are Turning Away from a Carbon Tax,”(December 9, 2018) and
• FT’s Trump Has Officially Ruined Climate Change Diplomacy for Everyone (December 12, 2018).

“Increasing the affordability of both U.S. and global energy is an important economic and humanitarian objective. Policy makers heeding the time-honored healer’s maxim, ‘First, do no harm,’ should reject policies to tax and regulate away mankind’s access to affordable energy.”

It is titled Free to Prosper: Energy and Environment: A Pro-Growth Agenda for the 116th Congress. It is the work of the energy and environmental stalwarts at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the organization long led by Fred L. Smith Jr. and now directed by Kent Lassman. And as always, it is reliable scholarship to inform both sides of the political aisle.

The energy White Paper is part of a broader book, Free to Prosper. The eight areas other than Energy and Environment are Regulatory Reform and Agency Oversight; Trade; Banking and Finance; Private and Public Lands; Technology and Telecommunications; Labor and Employment; Food, Drugs, and Consumer Freedom; and Transportation  That’s a lot of the federal matrix of public policy.…