“So why did nations from Australia to Europe and states such as California adopt an ineffectual bureaucratic cap-and-trade system? In a word: bribes.”

– James Hansen, “Washington [State] can Lead: Unwashed Version,” October 26, 2016.

“In every country and state where I have tried to make the case for a simple, honest carbon fee-and-dividend the politicians respond that they want part of the money to spend on ‘this and that’ ….”

– James Hansen, “Carbon Pricing: A Useful Cautionary Tale.” October 28, 2016.

The civil war in the environmental community, already evident in the debate over the future of nuclear power, also exists in climate policy between carbon taxation and cap-and-trade. MasterResource has published numerous posts summarizing the views of climate scientist James Hansen, and intellectual leader of CitizensClimateLobby.org…

“In the late 1970s, only three prominent energy experts continued to insist that oil prices would not rise inexorably and to display a contrariness to all efforts to dissuade them: Peter Odell of Erasmus University, the late Morry Adelman of MIT, and Arlon Tussing.” (Michael Lynch, below)

Several months ago, a giant of modern energy economics died at age 82. I belatedly sing his praises.

Arlon Tussing, author, co-author, or editor of an estimated 300 books and publications, influenced a generation of market-oriented energy economists. He also educated the energy industry by being realistic and blunt at a time when the conventional thinking was that ‘depleting’ resources meant that costs and prices had to go up.

Tussing analysis such as in his 1983 “An OPEC Obituary” (Public Interest) were spot-on, at a time when many voices were saying ‘Just Wait’ for Energy Crisis #3 (following #1’s Arab OPEC in 1973/74 and #2’s Iranian Revolution in 1979).…

“There is evidence that experience reduced the scope and se­verity of earlier errors [with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve]–that the 1981–84 perfor­mance was superior to the 1977–79 performance. But new facets of the pro­gram have brought new problems.”

“Combined with the $5 per barrel handling and storing expense [as of 1984], the overall market value of SPR oil is billions of dollars less than its embedded average cost of over $35 per barrel.”

A sacred cow of U.S. energy policy is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The case for the reserve assumes that another energy crisis lies around the corner, the reserve will be efficiently managed during the crisis to alleviate the emergency, and private inventories and entrepreneurship alone would be inadequate. The reserve is seen by proponents as the nation’s insurance policy against the inherent instability of the world oil market.…

“Even in flush economic times, carbon taxes would be bad policy. When economies are already laboring under too much spending and are at diminishing-return levels of taxation, implementing a carbon tax would be a mistake.”

– Kenneth Green, Dissecting the Carbon Tax, The American, July 13, 2012.

Open-mindedness is a mark of scholarship. And some great lights of classical-liberal social thought in the 20th century changed their minds for theoretical/empirical reasons from a utilitarian perspective.

F. A. Hayek began as a democratic socialist. Milton Friedman started as a FDR New Dealer and Keynesian. [1] Friedman later in life even moved away from his (naive) view of a fixed-monetary rule where, as he once put it, a computer program could manage the money supply. [2] Turns out that ‘money supply’ is not a fixed, known quantity; turns out that money is a government monopoly subject to politics.…