This post reprints Section 3.2.1 of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels (Summary for Policymakers here.) This is the fifth volume in the Climate Change Reconsidered series published by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
This treatise from The Heartland Institute continues a tradition of offering citizens and scholars an alternative view of all issues relating to climate science and climate policy. This brief excerpt (subtitles added) will be joined in the New Year with many other excerpts on specific issues to better disseminate the major findings of this major treatise.
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Fossil fuels make possible such transformative technologies as nitrogen fertilizer, concrete, the steam engine and cotton gin, electrification, the internal combustion engine, and the computer and Internet revolution.
Prior to the widespread use of fossil fuels, humans expended nearly as much energy (calories) producing food and finding fuel (primarily wood and dung) to warm their dwellings as their primitive technologies were able to produce.
“It has become increasingly clear that Donald Trump’s presidency hasn’t just led to the withdrawal of the United States from the landmark agreement. It has also halted the rest of the world’s efforts…. Call it the ‘Trump’ effect.”
– Joseph Curtin, “Trump Has Officially Ruined Climate Change Diplomacy for Everyone.” FT, December 12, 2018.
Another realistic, “defeatist” article about the futile global crusade to cap and reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions has been published. “Trump Has Officially Ruined Climate Change Diplomacy for Everyone,” subtitled “The evidence is in: the Paris Agreement doesn’t work without the United States,” joins other articles (such as rising global coal consumption, profiled last week at MasterResource) in the death rattle.
Joseph Curtin, senior fellow at the Institute of International and European Affairs, authored the blunt assessment.…
“The major international energy issue should not be climate change. It should be, per Guillermo M. Yeatts, country-by-country privatization of subsurface mineral rights to benefit the mass of surface owners and would-be entrepreneurs.”
He was a true friend of private property, free markets, the rule of law, and goodwill for all. He was a successful entrepreneur in the US and Latin America. He was a thinker and doer, building up an intellectual case for public policy reform and acting on it. And for a lot of us, he made classical liberalism more fun.
Guillermo M. Yeatts recently died just short of his 81st birthday. Born in Buenos Aires, he studied in America and successively rose in business in the US and in Argentina (see Appendix A). As he advanced, he embraced classical liberal think tanks at home and abroad, including the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the Institute for Energy Research (IER), the Atlas Society, and Fundación Atlas 1853.…