“I will not be bullied but will make my case for objective reporting with the above data point of Seth Borenstein’s article.” (below)
Seth Borenstein posted on LinkedIn:
Scientists in thousands of peer reviewed studies detail, calculate the public health threats, deaths and illnesses from climate change. President Trump calls it all a scam. A detailed look at what the studies and scientists say about the research. The three experts quoted are both MDs and have extra degrees and are professors of public health.
Borenstein was referring to his piece, “Scientific studies calculate climate change as health danger, while Trump calls it a ‘scam’” (AP: February 12, 2026). Read the article, which blows itself up at the end with his recognition that
…The issue gets complicated when cold-related deaths are factored in.
Ed Note: The Great Texas Blackout five years ago, the worst energy debacle in US history, was misinterpreted as a ‘market failure’ by the mainstream press (and faux classical liberal Lynne Kiesling). This repost stands today as it was written three years ago.
Electricity specialists at the University of Texas at Austin recently revisited the Great Texas Blackout of February 2021. The op-ed, “Two years after its historic deep freeze, Texas is increasingly vulnerable to cold snaps – and there are more solutions than just building power plants” (The Conversation), spreads the blame and recommends more government planning, not less.
The authors want to let wind and solar continue to “saturate” the market and regulate (via “smart meters”) usage in your home and business to save the grid.…
Ed. Note: Five years ago, Storm Uri caused Texas’s centrally planned wholesale electricity market (ERCOT) to buckle, vindicating warnings about the state’s wind/solar reliance. The mainstream media implicated natural gas instead, failing to explore the why behind the why. Rather than deregulation, Texas post-Uri has chosen to add wind, solar, and batteries, while subsidizing natural gas plants to counter intermittency. This duplicated grid is now driving rates up in a state that could have relied on surplus natural gas instead.
It was not so much the story of freak weather triggering a market failure writ large. It was a classic application of the political economy of government intervention: the seen and the unseen, expert/regulatory failure, and unintended consequences. Don Lavoie, a preeminent thinker in the field of market-versus-government planning, once warned:
…If the guiding agency is less knowledgeable than the system it is trying to guide—and even worse, if its actions necessarily result in further undesired consequences in the working of that system—then what is going on is not planning at all but, rather, blind interference by some agents with the plans of others.”