About a week ago, a strong winter storm, known as a nor’easter, was making its way, hit and miss, up the Northeastern seaboard. While forecasts of two feet or more in New York City were busts, forecasts of near three feet in the Boston environs were right on.

As almost goes without saying nowadays, speculation as to the influence of human-caused global warming on the behavior of the snowstorm are rife. Any by “speculation,” I mean blaming global warming for the storm’s ferocity.

And, as also goes without saying, the actual science behind such speculation is both slim and countered by a large body of confounding evidence.

But the number of stories in the mainstream media that hyped the former greatly outnumbered any that even bothered to mention the latter.

Below is reprinted a blog post that I co-authored with Patrick Michaels for the Cato Institute in the hours leading up to the storm trying to tamp down the global warming hype.…

Economic conservation of energy consists of voluntary actions and investments that make sense to the decision-maker in a free-market setting. Political conservation is  government-directed energy reduction measures. The later, conservationism, is energy savings for its own sake through monopolistic coercion or special favor (tax beak, crony regulation, or public check).

Demand-Side Management (DSM) programs by electric utilities are a major element of conservationism. Those who support reasonable efficiency and the elimination of waste should let the energy-efficiency politicos have the DSM term and use other words to describe what is favored.

DSM rose to regulatory prominence during the late 1980’s following the disastrous nuclear generation construction programs of the electric utilities. The confidence of the utility industry and its regulators in high-cost building programs shaken, they listened to new other approaches to meet future energy demand.…

The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science (see WiseEnergy.org for more).

For public education, every three weeks at MasterResource we offer this newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and environmental matters.

There is very positive news this cycle:

1- The best news in a long time is about the 12± year brawl to stop the ridiculous Cape Wind project. It finally seems to be fatally wounded, due to a combination of economic, legal and political matters. Kudos to those warriors who stuck with the fight, through thick and thin.

2- Also sensational news is the almost unanimous vote by the West Virginia state legislature to kill their RPS — the first state to actually do this.…

“Is this destruction and poisoning of the natural world, this trampling of human rights, the legacy  that climate campaigners want to leave the world? Is this really the only ethical way to deal with the question of global warming? Is it even ethical at all? … A public debate on the damage being done by climate change policy is long overdue.”

At the heart of much policy to deal with climate change lies an ethical approach to the question of intergenerational equity, namely that current generations should avoid passing costs onto future ones, who can play no part in the decisions. In fact it has been said that this is the only ethical way to deal with global warming, although this is not true – professional economists have identified several alternatives.…