Ed. Note: The Cato Institute has long been an intellectual and advocacy force for climate realism (the global lukewarming school), as well as free-market energy policies in the face of climate alarmism. This post shares Cato’s work on both issues in this historic week of climate activism to, in President Biden’s words, “set America on a path of net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050.”
This post will be updated with any new material from Cato on these subjects.
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[Nothing on Earth Day] [!!]
[April 23rd: Electric Vehicles and the Biden Infrastructure Plan]
This post by Chris Edwards is just regular fare with little-to-nothing to do with the climate/energy transformation war raging outside of Cato’s windows.
The piece is also very shallow and politically correct, trying to make the argument that more government subsidies are not needed because electric vehicles (EVs) can now stand on their own….…
Continue Reading“What many environmentalists seem incapable of understanding is that resources are created. After all, crude oil is just sludge until you get it out of the ground and figure out how to use it as an energy source.”
“This Earth Day, we should all give two green thumbs up for human freedom and innovation.”
There is a certain fringe of the environmentalist movement whose members have almost nothing good to say about their fellow men and women. If not for humans, they sometimes explicitly argue, the Earth would be a wonderful place. The lion might not lie down with the lamb, but at least “nature” would be allowed to run its course unobstructed by humankind—which in their reckoning is somehow not a part of nature.
Admittedly, humans have a particular nature that sets them apart from the rest of the fauna on this planet.…
Continue ReadingThis reprint from a collection of essays at Julian Simon.com is published as an ode to Earth Day (tomorrow). This piece was finalized in Simon’s treatise, The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996), pp. 604–607. Simon’s relative politeness to his adversary is a tribute to open, honest, and respectful debate (versus the Paul R. Ehrlich approach).
“When you launch a space shuttle you don’t trot out the flat-earthers to be commentators. They’re outside the bounds of what ought to be discourse in the media. In the field of ecology, Simon is the absolute equivalent of the flat-earthers.” (Paul Ehrlich, quoted below)
For economy of treatment of the matter of attack rhetoric, let’s focus on just one critic, Paul Ehrlich, who has directed a great deal of colorful language in my direction (see also his comments in the Afternote to Chapter 15, and my interchange with him in Simon, 1990, Selection 43).…
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