“White’s failure to give the politically correct answer to heat storage in the ocean pales in comparison to the response of EPA Director Gina McCarthy in Senate testimony in 2005 when asked: ‘Is the temperature around the globe increasing faster than was predicted, even 10 years ago?’ McCarthy’s answer: ‘I can’t answer that question’.”

“Having a well-experienced, pragmatic, and scientifically literate head of the CEQ has fallen victim to political correctness, anti-scientific dogma, and political bullying.”

The Trump administration’s announcement last month to withdraw the nomination of Kathleen Harnett White to head the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) gives yet another example of Voltaire’s commentary on the intersection of politics and, in this case,  science: “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authority is wrong.”

White currently heads the energy and environmental program at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.…

“R Street continues to live the lie of ‘engag[ing] in policy research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government.’ Pricing carbon dioxide, replete with global tariffs (‘border adjustments’) and tax differentials (‘equity adjustments’), coupled with a government-forced transformation to (not so) ‘clean’ political energies, has nothing to do with classical liberalism, energy freedom, free markets, or limited-and-effective government.”

It had to happen.

With its Left Progressive donors, R Street Institute was going to march down the statist road as one initiative got replaced with another.

Founded in 2012 with climate-alarmist/Left money, R Street tried to shed into new free-market skin by pitching a seemingly soft proposal to substitute new/better government intervention for worse/existing intervention. Specifically, replace existing climate regulation with carbon-dioxide (CO2) tax-and-dividend. That was during the Obama era, assumed to turn into the Hillary era.…

“I cannot recall a representative from a free-market think tank (Cato, CEI, IER, etc.) ever addressing the CERA throngs. This does not speak well for the organizers intellectually or as trusted consultants. Truth bats last in public policy.”

“Oil and gas are booming in the US as never before. It is time to not only expose the fallacies of Peak Oil and Energy Security, it is time to explode the neo-Malthusian exaggerations about fossil fuels and climate change.”

The 37th edition of Daniel Yergin’s CERAWeek (IHS-Markit) starts on Monday March 5th, concluding on Friday March 9th. Speaker slots fare full.

We are at a “tipping point” that demands “strategies for a new energy future,” declares the headline of the upcoming CERAWeek conference, the annual gathering of the energy industry in Houston, Texas.…

[Editor note: A new paper by Christopher Booker, GLOBAL WARMING: A Case Study of Groupthink (subtitled How science can shed new light on the most important ‘non-debate’ of our time) was released yesterday by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The full paper is highly recommended, but a useful summary of major climate-debate events is provided below in Mr. Booker’s Introduction.]

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“… the rest of the world had no intention of going along with the declared aim of Paris, to agree on the wholesale ‘decarbonisation’ of the world’s economy. Yet astonishingly, so lost were developed countries in the groupthink that the Western media failed to recognize what was happening. One person who did was President Trump who, to the fury of all those still blinded by the groupthink, gave the refusal of the rest of the world to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions as his reason for pulling the US out of the Paris Accord (although even now this was not picked up by those reporting on his decision in the West).”