[Editor note: The author, a longtime critic of activist government climate policy, takes on a recent climate plan by the City of Houston. His open letter to Lara Cottingham, Houston Chief Sustainability Officer, City of Houston, follows.]
“Explain how 8 per cent wind and solar will replace 62 per cent reliable energy 24/7. Texas winds may be a bit more steady, but during heat spells, wind activity … falls just when it is needed the most.”
” A logical conclusion is that the city and staff may have an agenda for wishing to ration energy in the city not related to temperature or climate change, or perhaps that they are uninformed of these climate/energy facts.
Houston City government and staff have arbitrarily decided to pledge, figuratively speaking, allegiance to U.N.…
“[Business columnist] Chris Tomlinson fails to mention fascist governance as another possibility whereby the means of production are ostensibly in private hands, but serve actively to implement government policy. Crony capitalism comes close to that model as larger corporations do a mating dance melding government funding with government policy, and shut out the less well funded and connected smaller commercial entities, while the hapless public gets taxed to fund the charade.”
Chris Tomlinson‘s columns in the Business section of the Houston Chronicle opine on broadly defined energy issues, especially those with a perceived impact on Houston. He is dismissive of the central role of mineral energies for today’s standard of living and refuses to question climate alarmism (the Dessler effect?). He sees government correction as automatic, as if there were not “government failure” in the quest to address “market failure.”…
“White’s failure to give the politically correct answer to heat storage in the ocean pales in comparison to the response of EPA Director Gina McCarthy in Senate testimony in 2005 when asked: ‘Is the temperature around the globe increasing faster than was predicted, even 10 years ago?’ McCarthy’s answer: ‘I can’t answer that question’.”
“Having a well-experienced, pragmatic, and scientifically literate head of the CEQ has fallen victim to political correctness, anti-scientific dogma, and political bullying.”
The Trump administration’s announcement last month to withdraw the nomination of Kathleen Harnett White to head the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) gives yet another example of Voltaire’s commentary on the intersection of politics and, in this case, science: “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authority is wrong.”
White currently heads the energy and environmental program at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.…