[Editor note: This exchange at the R-Street Institute website (no longer visible) is posted here and here.]
“From the Club of Rome to the present–with scientific models and articles in Science magazine from the ‘consensus’–the verdict has been wrong, wrong, wrong, and trending wrong. And this is before even considering (non-libertarian) public policy of taxes, tariffs, equity adjustments, private/public cronyism, etc.”
So why have neo-Malthusian natural scientists been so incorrect for so long? We have nearly a half-century of (falsified) doom-and-gloom.
Josiah Neeley of R-Street, once a critic of climate alarmism and wind power (see yesterday), is now desperately trying to make a case to libertarians and conservatives that the climate is in crisis and a carbon tax (and all the global government that goes with it) is necessary.…
“The debate over a carbon tax is now not just one of theoretical speculation; proponents need to explain why the U.S. outcome would be different from what actually happened in Australia.”
“Wind power simply cannot be scaled up to replace traditional energy sources such as fossil fuels and nuclear power….Wind subsidies might make a few people rich, but they won’t make wind a free market success story.”
– Josiah Neeley (below)
Time is relentless when it comes to the advantages from mineral-energy density and disdavantages from wind and solar intermittency. Such energy reality creates a sharp divide between consumer-chosen free-market energy and government-directed political energy. Or more bluntly, voluntary choice and coerced choice.
And when it comes to the carbon tax, real-world politics bats last, evicerating any theoretical scheme to implement a (God-like) revenue-neutral, equity-adjusted, border-adjusted carbon-dioxide (CO2) tax.…
“Mr. Anderson and the Energy and Policy Institute marginalize themselves by assuming what must be debated. Thinking persons want to know about tradeoffs: economic and environmental. And what about the fact that Tom Stacy has been and mostly is a volunteer for his cause, unlike Anderson who gets a nice full-time, six-figure salary for his?”
It is strange to read a perfectly normal, accurate biography of someone only to realize that the other side is using facts to try to smear someone for doing a sensible thing.
And for Tom Stacy, that “thing” is pushing back at the grassroots level against monstrous industrial wind turbines that are environmentally invasive, anti-consumer, and anti-taxpayer.
Yet mainstream environmentalists, favoring high prices and less reliability for the master resource of energy, not to mention environmental energy sprawl, pretend that there is an inherent social good in renewable energies that are inferior in every which way.…