” … with adaptation, total costs will be much smaller than the headline-grabbing numbers that climate economists and our government agencies choose to highlight, and with future growth our society will be far better equipped to handle them.” (- Oren Cass, June 2019)
While government mitigation policies flounder and add waste to waste, market adaptation quietly internalizes the alleged negative externality of the human influence on global climate. Part of this influence is increased precipitation and flooding from a warmer world where the air holds more moister from the evaporation below.
MasterResource has reported from time to time on the almost invisible, ongoing climate/weather adaptation process, the unhampered market in action (see Appendix).
Tabasco Plant (2019)
One example that caught my eye a few years back was the McIlhenny Company constructing a 20-foot levee around its Tabasco plant on Avery Island off the Louisiana coast to insure against flooding.…
Continue ReadingBack in December 2015, I submitted an editorial to the Houston Chronicle that they published in their edition to the suburbs–but not Houston proper. The fix was in; this would be one of the last editrials I would have published at a major suburban newspaper that went Left, far Left.
In the buildup to the Nov. 30-Dec. 11 United Nations climate summit in Paris, climate alarmists tried to end intellectual debate over the enhanced greenhouse effect. This is the 28th year of the climate crusade to globally cap industrial life.
The secular religion of climate “stabilization” did not arise from nowhere. It emerged in the same period as the discrediting of the Malthusian mainstays of depletion and pollution, as well as the discrediting of socialism/central planning. As such, it has been a savior for government control of economic life, or statism.…
Continue Reading“Rob, you certainly have the right to participate in the discussion but it is clear to me (and others) that you do not understand how the ERCOT market actually functions. Instead you spout off free market economic theories without getting down and dirty into the details of how to apply them to power systems. In the real world the devil is in the details.” (Robert Borlick, below)
“Rob, why are you shilling for the natural gas industry?” (Borlick, below)
Welcome to the political economy of electricity from the expert/planner viewpoint. Electricity is different. Its complexity requires central planning/regulation. The free market does not work. Ergo, free-market theories do not apply.
Bottom line: Experts/planners/regulators/politicians must get “down and dirty into the details of how to apply them to power systems.”
Previous posts (here and here) have chronicled my interaction with electricity planning experts in the wake of the Great Texas Power Blackout of February 2021.…
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