“I will grant that [Kevon Martis] gave a polished presentation of some very selected ‘facts’ totally trashing wind turbines and the power companies and wind energy companies associated with them. His one hour presentation had all of 5 seconds where he had something positive to say about wind turbines as ‘giving local entities a little bit of tax money’ (Don Smucker, below).
“If there was a substantive criticism in my talk, Smucker never proffered it and resorted instead to base name calling.” (Martis, below)
Industrial wind turbines: Dilute. Intermittent. Unneeded. Duplicative. Taxpayer/government dependent. Ugly. Noisy. Blade shadows. Flicker light. Bird hazard. Infrastructure heavy (steel, concrete, and land). Energy sprawl (service roads, long transmission to markets with line loss). Landfill issues.
Is wind the perfect imperfect energy for the modern electricity grid?…
Continue Reading“A defense of liberal institutions is needed now more than ever, and Julian Simon’s work, and the work of the previous winners of the Simon Award, will be crucial in providing it.”
“… for population growth to get translated into economic progress we need liberal institutions.”
Ed. Note: This completes a three-part series on the views of the late Steve Horwitz (1964–2021), the first two being on the climate debate and a carbon tax.
Since 2001, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, along with the Simon family, has presented an annual Julian Simon Award. The first award winner was Stephen Moore, a former research fellow for Dr. Simon (1982–85) who has promoted the Simon worldview ever since.
The most recent award winner was Stephen Horwitz, whose comments follow below.
Fellow professor and classical liberal Peter Boettke shared Horwitz’s remarks below on social media with the comment:
… Continue ReadingI do think in the interview so much of what was truly wonderful about Steve comes out.
Ed. Note: The late Steven Horwitz addressed the climate-change debate and related policy issues in ways that remain highly pertinent to today’s debate. Yesterday, he argued that social science, not only physical science, was crucial for public policy. Today, Horwitz’s views on the carbon dioxide (CO2) tax are revisited.
“First, finding the right tax/fee/price is not a simple thing…. Bureaucratically set prices or fees do not have the same powerful incentives for careful behavior, nor will they ever capture as much knowledge, as do real market prices. Given that, political battles over those taxes and fees are inevitable, and with such battles out goes any semblance of economic rationality.”
To say that he was a quick study was an understatement. The late Steve Horwitz imparted a lot of common sense to a lot of areas, including the climate change and carbon tax debates.…
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