Ken Green at MasterResource published an influential post, The Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism Continues (June 2, 2010), that began with two quotations:

“We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

– James Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006.

“Desperation is setting in among climate alarmists who by their own math can see that the window is rapidly closing on ’saving the planet’.”

– Kenneth Green, ”A Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism, Redux?” MasterResource, September 30, 2009.

And what was true in June is even more true today as the failure to price carbon dioxide (CO2) is leaving Europe as the sacrificial lambs on an altar of climate-change inconsequentiality.…

[Editor note: Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) removed a federal renewable mandate from the energy bill now under debate. However, Sen. Brownback of Kansas has indicated his intention to add an amendment to the bill resurrecting such a mandate.]

US Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) displays a national debt clock on his home page and is a proclaimed conservative. Yet he supports wasteful government spending on deployment of impotent technologies like wind energy.

I believe Sam and his kind are the root cause of a failure for industrial windpower opponents to gain the upper hand in Washington D.C. I further believe that in Brownback’s case, his faulty platform correlates to his committee membership, which shows his allegiance to the agriculture lobby, which represent the secondary financial beneficiaries of wind energy deployment.…

Editor note: Milton Friedman would be 98 this Saturday July 31. (He died on November 16, 2006.) This exchange with Robert Bradley–when Dr. Friedman was 91 years old–is testament to the mental powers of one of the greatest social thinkers of modern time.

Friedman had not met Bradley but was in the habit of actively communicating with scholars until his final illness.

I had heard that the great economist and social thinker Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was a prolific communicator with those who posed worthy questions to him. So when I got interested in mineral resource theory, which would culminate with my 2007 essay, Resourceship: An Austrian Theory of Mineral Resources, I asked Dr. Friedman in August 2003 about his views on the late Julian Simon (1932–98), specifically whether Simon’s work on resources, and his conception of the ultimate resource, merited a Nobel Prize in economics.…

Between the current financial mess and the debate over carbon dioxide emissions controls, there is a lot of talk about regulation these days.  We are told, for example, that the recession would have been prevented if proper regulations had been in place.  While it is true that (by definition) the “right” regulations would have prevented bad and ensured good, it is also true that had an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent dictator been in charge, the recession would have been avoided as well.  The problem, of course, is that God, being otherwise occupied, didn’t run for President during the last election.

Enacting the right regulations is somewhat simpler than electing an omni-everything being to run the world, but not much.  As evidence, consider the fact that it was a lot of the wrong regulations that got us into this mess in the first place.  …