Earlier this week, President Obama signed an administrative directive to ensure that scientific fact – not ideological fancy – informs federal policy. Well, good for him. Now that he’s overturned the Bush administration’s prohibitions against using federal money to undertake some forms of research associated with embryonic stem cells, up next should be an administrative about-face on corn ethanol as a means of addressing climate change. Alas, the possibility that Obama will admit error on this matter is only slightly better than the possibility that Jessica Simpson will someday win the Nobel Prize for physics. Ideology trumping science? Bad. Politics trumping science? Business as usual.

Regardless, let’s quickly review the literature on ethanol and climate change.…

[Ed Note: This letter is available on the Internet and is reproduced here with permission of the Julian Simon family.]

“So how about it, Al [Gore]?  Will you accept the offer?  And how about your boss Bill Clinton, who supports your environmental initiatives?  Can you bring him in for a piece of the action?”

EARTH DAY: SPIRITUALLY UPLIFTING, INTELLECTUALLY DEBASED

– by Julian L. Simon

April 22 [1995] marks the 25th anniversary of Earth Day.  Now as then its message is spiritually uplifting.  But all reasonable persons who look at the statistical evidence now available must agree that Earth Day’s scientific premises are entirely wrong.

During the first great Earth Week in 1970 there was panic.  The public’s outlook for the planet was unrelievedly gloomy.  The doomsaying environmentalists–of whom the dominant figure was Paul Ehrlich–raised the alarm: The oceans and the Great Lakes were dying;…

The American Clean Energy and Security Act, better known as the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill, has been shown to be completely ineffective at slowing the rise in global temperature that is projected by climate models to accompany mankind’s continued reliance on fossil fuels for energy production. And this, despite the bill’s mandated cut-back of U.S. greenhouse gases emissions by a whopping 83% below 2005’s levels by the year 2050. As the primary purpose of the bill is to mitigate “global warming” and any follow-on impacts, Waxman-Markey, on its own, would seem an abject failure.

If you need any more proof, consider the bill’s effect on projected sea level rise. Recall that the specter of rapid sea level rise is one of the pillars of alarmist claims for impending climate catastrophe and calls for immediate action.…

“The first great requisite of motive power is, that it shall be wholly at our command, to be exerted when, and where, and in what degree we desire. The wind, for instance, as a direct motive power, is wholly inapplicable to a system of machine labour, for during a calm season the whole business of the country would be thrown out of gear.”

– William Stanley Jevons,  The Coal Question (1865), p. 122.

Texas has repeatedly been lauded as a leader in wind power development. Some of that attention is deserved. In 2008, the state installed nearly 2,700 megawatts of new wind capacity. If Texas were an independent country, it would rank 6th in the world in terms of total wind power production capacity. But such growth is not the result of the free-market energy choices.…