“America can continue paying billions in subsidies annually to finance “green” technologies and agenda-driven science. Or we can generate hundreds of billions a year in royalties and taxes, create millions of jobs, and rejuvenate our economy by applying commonsense regulation to the Big Three consumer-chosen energies–oil, gas, and coal.”

The United States is now Balkanized into five distinct voting blocs, notes Joel Kotkin (two blue, two red, one blue?red). Other political analysts see the nation bifurcating along “makers” and “takers” lines, while still others say 50.6% of the popular vote is hardly a mandate.

In any event, when American voters reelected President Obama, they also returned his wide-ranging agenda at the EPA, Interior, Energy, and Justice departments for “fundamentally transforming” our nation from its limited-government roots. And not in the name of sound science and realistic tradeoffs between market failure and government failure. …

“The Governors know that the federal PTC disproportionately benefits States with renewable mandates by distributing the high cost of their policies to taxpayers at large. They also understand that eliminating the PTC will impose the full burden of costly renewable mandates squarely on the States who enacted them. If California, New York, and Minnesota mandate large wind development, it’s appropriate they bear the full cost of their energy choices.”

The United States is in the midst of a fiscal crisis. If Congress and the White House are unable to reach agreement on spending by January 1, crushing tax increases and draconian budget cuts will go into effect sending the country’s already weakened economy into another destructive recession.

Against this backdrop, the 23-member Governors’ Wind Energy Coalition put aside their own states’ $2+ trillion deficits[1] to deliver a message to Congress — extend the wind production tax credit (PTC).…

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children. It has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate.’”

– Joe Romm, quoted in Thomas Friedman, Is the Inflection Point Near?, New York Times, March 7, 2009.

“Is there any more single-minded, simple pleasure than viewing with alarm? At times it is even better than sex.”

—Kenneth Boulding (1970), p. 160. [1]

Are free-market optimists the dumb ones who jump off tall buildings and report that everything is fine, even breezy, on the way down? Or are those who fear, rant, and make this analogy bungee-jumping with reality?

The optimists have been jumping off buildings ever since Robert Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on Population was published in 1798–and not hitting the ground.…

The Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science (which I am part of) will soon release the final version of its major report examining the potential impacts of climate change in the United States.

Addendum: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States grew from our desire to show how the government report, after which the Cato report was modeled, could have/should have looked if the original scientists involved had included a more thorough (less narrow) review of the scientific literature and had not been obviously predisposed towards climate-change doom-and-gloom.

Cato’s “Addendum” title draws attention to the fact that the original 2009 report from the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program (USGCRP) was incomplete and insufficient on the day it was published–and is out-of-date given peer-review studies of the last several years.…