“Let’s be clear: the frequent comparison of the fossil fuel and tobacco industries is nonsense. Fossil fuels are a valuable energy source that has done yeomen service for humankind. One gallon (3.7 liters) of gasoline (petrol) contains the equivalent of 400 hours of labor by a healthy adult. Fossil fuels raised living standards in much of the world.”
– James Hansen, June 2021
The father of the climate alarm is a straight and accurate shooter on many things, that is outside of climate models and unsettled climate dynamics. His quotation above throws water in the face of Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University, as well as such climate campaigners as Michael Mann and Andrew Dessler.
Hansen’s view is actually mainstream. There is no doubt that dense mineral energies that emerged and took hold by the end of the 19th century unleashed the machines of progress.…
Continue Reading“Although advocacy of aggressive climate-change policies is often draped with the mantle of science, mainstream economists who follow the scientific literature have shown that the popular 1.5°C policy target will pose costs that far exceed the benefits, and that the emission reductions flowing from strict adherence to the 1.5°C target would be worse for the world than doing nothing at all.” (Murphy and McKitrick, below)
Adaptation, not mitigation, has long been the answer of climate economics for climate policy. In fact, at lower climate sensitivity estimates, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are thought to be a positive externality, in the jargon of economics, not a negative requiring government correction.
A new study by Robert P. Murphy and Ross McKitrick, Off Target: The Economics Literature Does Not Support the 1.5C Climate Ceiling, explains this to professional economists and the climate intelligentia alike.…
Continue Reading… the prospect of cheap, inexhaustible power from fusion is “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child,” Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich says. Laments Washington-based author-activist Jeremy Rifkin, “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet.”
So what do Big Government, anti-freedom eco-activists really want?
This is the perennial question regarding nuclear power, which is really the only scalable low-to-no CO2-emitting choice for electrical generation. When recently asked this question by a political economist friend who only tangentially follows energy, I went to Google to find the Paul Ehrlich quotation above. And lo-and-behold, I found a whole article around it!
Paul Ciottin’s, “Fear of Fusion: What if It Works?” appeared in the Los Angeles Times on April 19, 1989. It is certainly worth revisiting in its entirety some 32 years later.…
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