“I was asked once by some skeptics what the most important libertarian accomplishment ever was. I said ‘the abolition of slavery.’ OK, they conceded. Name another. I thought more carefully and said ‘bringing power under the rule of law’.”

– David Boaz, “Power and Law,” Cato Policy Report, July/August 2012, p. 2.

[Friday posts sometimes take a more general, big-picture look at the science of liberty and ‘why we fight.’ Cato executive vice president David Boaz is featured today in his recent editorial for Cato Policy Report. The Cato Institute has played an important role in energy and energy/environmental scholarship in the last several decades.]

At Public Policy Day, our event for Cato Sponsors held after the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty Dinner, I thanked our Sponsors for our beautiful expanded building.…

This summer Australia implemented a new tax on the country’s top 500 carbon emitters, which has already led to significant increase in electricity prices. Meanwhile, on August 2, Congressman Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) introduced his own carbon tax bill in the House of Representatives, which like the Australian tax is targeted at certain disfavored emitters.

Talk of a federal carbon tax has been recently revived by several conservative-leaning groups. Earlier this year Robert Inglis (former Republican Congressman from South Carolina) launched the Energy and Enterprise Institute, a new advocacy group aimed at marketing carbon taxes to Republicans. And last month rumors of carbon tax discussions at the American Enterprise Institute led AEI’s own Ken Green to reiterate his opposition to the carbon tax idea.

What sets the new conservative proponents of carbon taxes apart from traditional advocates is revenue neutrality.…

“At the rate the WT6500 [off-grid wind turbine] is delivering power at our test site, it would take several millennia for the product to pay for itself in savings—not the 56 years it would take even with the 1,155 kWh quote we received.”

– ConsumerReports.com

Is there a role for new renewables, specifically wind and solar PV in our electricity generation portfolio? And if not at the industrial-scale, grid-feeding level, what about at the micro-turbine level for local electricity use? This Consumer Reports (CR) study answers just this question.

Before examining the verdict, CR’s claim that wind power is the fastest growing source of new electric power deserves a critical comment. “Fast growing” from a small base too often is hype over substance.

Take the example of the lemonade stand of a little girl on our street, Suzie, just this summer.…

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.