“The Utter Complete Total Fraud of Wind Power’ (Matt Ridley presents the facts)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- September 19, 2017

“[I]t is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the extraordinary polymath Sir David MacKay pointed out, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables.”

– Matt Ridley, “Wind is an Irrelevance to the Energy and Climate Debate“(May 15, 2017)

An op-ed and blog post several months ago by Matt Ridley is still making the rounds. A great thinker, Ridley gets to the essence of things. He is hard to ignore, even by his critics. Ridley’s book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010), is a seminal contribution in the Julian Simon tradition. (His other work can be found here.)

Here are some salient excerpts from his op-ed/post:

“[Wind power’s] contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

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State Department Climate Pullback (remembering Tillerson’s 2013 views)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- September 14, 2017

“How do you want to deal with that great social challenge? To what good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers in the process of those efforts when you don’t know exactly what your impacts are going to be? So we [at ExxonMobil] have taken a much more balanced view and we said let’s manage the things, we know how to do manage today.” – Rex Tillerson (2013)

“Rex Tillerson just took the State Department another step back from acting on climate change,” laments Samantha Page at ThinkProgress (Center for American Progress). “This is part of a streamlining that reduced a number of special envoy positions as redundant or outdated.”

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Worse Case Events and Human Progress: Julian Simon’s Insight Post-Harvey

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- September 7, 2017

“Material insufficiency and environmental problems have their benefits, over and beyond the improvement which they invoke. They focus the attention of individuals and communities, and constitute a set of challenges which can bring out the best in people.”

– Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996), p. 587.

“We need our problems, though this does not imply that we should purposely create additional problems for ourselves.”

– Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996), p. 588.

The rains from Hurricane Harvey presented a worst-case event for Houston, Texas, and the petroleum/petrochemical capital of the United States. As such, a lesser known part of the Julian Simon (1932–1998) worldview of human progress comes into play.

Simon argued that there was a driving force or condition for human improvement beyond the institutional framework (private property, voluntary exchange, the rule of law), based on the human potential of motivation, effective use of knowledge, trial and error feedback, etc.…