“Bad Profits, rent-seeking, resource misallocation–it’s an upside down world, turning Ayn Rand’s dis-utopian world in Atlas Shrugged into reality one step at a time.”

“Manchin-Schumer leaves no special interest unrewarded,” wrote Robert Bryce. “The legislation is so broad and has so many carve outs that it has been lauded by Exxon Mobil and the Natural Resources Defense Council.”

The new law’s “lollipops” (Bryce) go to wind, solar, EVs, ethanol, carbon capture and storage, and hydrogen–all money losers on a real free market. Bad Profits, rent-seeking, resource misallocation–it’s an upside down world, turning Ayn Rand’s dis-utopian world in Atlas Shrugged into reality one step at a time.

It is a sad day when ExxonMobil, once a bastion of climate and energy realism and good business, goes all-in with the Inflation Reduction Act
of 2022.…

“Back to the greenwash misdirection…. Why not add U.S. DOE secretary Jennifer “Please get your rig count up” Granholm to the list? How about the wind and solar developers who really don’t care about the damage they cause around them? How about the whole biomass industry?”

Paul Watchman is an amiable chap I have gotten to know on social media. Patient and polite, seems open-minded and respectful of opposing views, including mine toward Net Zero.

Watchman has many titles and positions in the climate debate, including Special Legal Adviser at UNEP Principles of Sustainable Development Net Zero Insurance Underwriters Alliance. This Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Glasgow is deep in the intellectual climate vanguard. [1]

“Greenwashing Day”

In a post titled “Greenwashing Day,” Watchman cuts loose on what he sees as a lot of fake greenery in the Net Zero cause.…

“We, the Republican Party voters of Harris County Texas, urge the Texas legislature to enact laws protecting Texans from the Green New Deal and further subsidization of wind farms in Texas…”

The massive overreach of the Green New Deal, brought to life by the radical left in charge of the Biden Administration, has provoked an opposite reaction by Republicans at all levels of government. Witness a recent counter-offensive by Harris County (Houston) Republicans, who have had enough of the government-enabled takeover of the Texas grid by industrial wind turbines, a story that goes back to Enron’s Ken Lay and a number of pragmatic Republican politicians, led by George W. Bush and Rick Perry.

Note that government favor is being replaced by government disfavor in the proposal given that local officials are powerless to repeal the federal Production Tax Credit (extended 13 times) and other privileges that empower wind.…

Business as a force for government intervention into the economy is evident with one of the major global economic issues of recent times, climate change. Wind companies, solar companies, energy-efficiency companies, carbon capture and storage investors, etc. Their bread is buttered by special government favor, whether a direct payment from the public treasury or a tax credit or a regulatory preference.

Rent-seeking by business is a contra-capitalist practice, long exposed and criticized by free market economists and classical liberals. But there are two other related practices that classical liberalism has long warned against and censored.

One concerns strategic deceit by a business to outside parties, whether stock analysts or direct investors. In the spirit of Ayn Rand, this can be called philosophic fraud. This syndrome is present with companies that are overhyped and desperately trying to keep the music going.…