I am part of an online event hosted by The Economist magazine debating the proposition:

This house believes that subsidising renewable energy is a good way to wean the world off fossil fuels.

I am opposed. Defending the motion is Matthias Fripp, Research fellow, Environmental Change Institute and Exeter College, Oxford University, who defends renewables from the premise that “we must reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050 in order to avoid dangerous risks to the environment and ourselves.”

With my opening statement, I began with a recent observation by the rising UK intellectual star Matt Ridley and continued with the timeless insight of William Stanley Jevons. Readers of MasterResource know Jevons well from previous posts, but I wanted to make sure to put him front and center of this debate to awaken his homeland that he ‘refuted’ renewables nearly 150 years ago.…

The longtime chairman of the Cato Institute, William N. Niskanen, passed away last week at age 78. We shared the podium a few times on energy issues, and I admired his Enron project at Cato that resulted in two books, Corporate Aftershock: Lessons from the Collapse of Enron and Other Major Corporations (2003) and After Enron: Lessons for Public Policy (2005).

Like virtually everyone else who knew him, I remember Bill as a scholar and gentleman. He had one tone of voice and reliably imparted insightful logic. He was what I like to call a scholar’s scholar, role model for the rest of us.

Career

William Arthur Niskanen Jr. (1933–2011), born in Bend, Oregon, graduated from Harvard University with a degree in economics in 1954. He earned his economics doctorate in 1962 from the University of Chicago.…

[Ed. note: This post complements that of Ken Green earlier this week, Five Climate Questions for Richard Muller (Temperature findings begin, not end, the real debate)]

The recent announcement of the results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) Project by project chairman Richard Muller has caused quite a stir. True believers in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) have greeted it as the final nail in the coffin of dissent. Why? Because it concludes—take a deep breath, now—that “Global warming is real.”

Jumping to Conclusions

At the Washington Post, for example, opinion writer Eugene Robinson states:

For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.

The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own.

“Sorry to bother you with this…. Rob is obviously not a fan of renewables or the global warming issue.  Unfortunately, he works for a company that is.”

– “Rob Bradley’s Writings.” Tom White [chairman & CEO of Enron Renewables Energy Corp. ] to Ken Lay [chairman & CEO of Enron Corp.], June 8, 1998.

The Confluence, a blog advertising itself as “Democrats Putting Principle Over Party,” recently criticized a new initiative of the Institute for Energy Research, Stop the Energy Freeze. After reciting some peak-oil arguments against IER’s case for expanding access and production of domestic oil and gas resources for new jobs and greater BTUs, the post Sunday: Spreading the mess to YouTube goes after yours truly.

I also bothered to look up who was behind this Stop the Energy Freeze campaign.