My least favorite think tank is Shikha Dalmia’s Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist. Left-funded and a pretend classical-liberal group, it promotes a vague ‘liberalism’. ISMA is a Trump-hate group of disaffected, politically homeless folk who have forgotten that statism is the enemy, not Donald Trump. Thus, they do not apply their metrics to the Progressive Left–just Trump. And their TDS has put them at odds with normal folk. [1]

This fringe group is a home to Left Libertarians who, among other things, play up climate alarmism and thus the Climate Industrial Complex’s forced energy transformation. Jonathan Adler, who I have taken to task (without his promised rebuttal), fits right in with Shikha’s group. Employing judicial activism, Adler assumes CO2 is a deleterious pollutant to argue for tort law for the ‘victims’ (fill in the blank) to sue the ‘guilty’ (everyone, really).…

“A free market in electricity is based on private property rights and voluntary exchange.”

– Michael Giberson, May 19, 2024

It’s a start. It took me a few dozen tries, but the definition has come from a (not-so) free market electricity advocate, Mike Giberson. Maybe Lynne Kiesling, woman of system and “The Queen of Electricity Markets,” will be next.

Fake free marketeers at the Niskanen Center and at R Street Institute are a plague on sound public policy analysis regarding electricity and other climate/energy issues. The sad case of Jerry Taylor of Cato and Niskanen is recounted here and here. But the problem also is with the energy specialists at R Street, including senior fellow Giberson. (See yesterday’s post on Devin Hartman, Giberson’s boss.)

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Mike Giberson knows his energy stuff and was/is free market in many areas, except for electricity.…

The ability and beneficience of free minds and markets to handle the unknowns of future weather and ‘climate change’ has a strong intellectual case. Such is more true today than when the global warming debate began in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Four decades on, the case of classical liberalism against climate alarmism and forced energy transformation remains intact and strong–probably stronger than ever given the “saturation effect” of greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing. [1] In fact, the debate should be not about the weather or climate but about Statism, that gargoyle of government intervention that makes rich people poorer and keeps poor people poor. Regarding climate, statism is what sets up the problems that are too often simplistically and erroneously blamed on ‘weather’ or ‘climate’.

I bring this up in relation to a new book that ignores and dumbs down the free-market, classical-liberal viewpoint on energy/climate in the name of … “classical liberalism.”…

“The border tax adjustment would be hugely complex given the international supply-chain system, leading to an increase in the attendant bureaucracy even if the regulatory bureaucracy is reduced in size.”

“The CLC proposal is poor conceptually and deeply unserious.”

Six years ago, economist Ben Zycher, the John Searle chair at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), published an analysis that rings true today–if not more true. “The Deeply-Flawed Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax,” subtitled “’Conservatives’ Endorse the Broken-Windows Fallacy, Reject Evidence and Rigor,” outlined the arguments that once-proud Resources for the Future would not.

Zycher’s piece employed Economics 101 to refute a proposal from the Climate Leadership Council, the Baker-Shultz ‘Carbon Dividends Plan’, that attempted to fool Republicans and conservatives that carbon dioxide (CO2) was a pollutant that the U.S.…