“On the climate issue, RFF has become the intellectual arm of the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC), just as RFF board member David Hawkins (of NRDC) desires.”
Resources for the Future (RFF) was once a much more scholarly think tank than it is today. It did not assume but evaluated and debated energy economics and related environmental issues.
On climate change, in particular, RFF has gone into the tank of alarmism–and is now a full-fledged foe of the free-market-oriented energy policies underway in the Trump Administration. In fact, RFF has become the intellectual arm of the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC), just as RFF board member David Hawkins (of NRDC) desires.
Sad, sad. From its glorious beginning in the 1950s and 1960s–publishing treatises and shorter studies on resource availability–RFF went Malthusian in the 1970s, a story recounted by the late mineral economist Richard Gordon and myself elsewhere.…
“I have made it clear in this campaign that I am not calling for any tax increase on gasoline, on oil, on natural gas, or anything else. I am calling for tax cuts to stimulate the production of new sources of domestic energy and new technologies to improve efficiency.”
– Al Gore (2000)
“As long as I’m President, we’re going to keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure, and we’re going to do it in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people. We don’t have to choose between one or the other, we can do both.”
– Barack Obama (2012)
For a very brief moment early in his first term, President Obama played the pro-oil card for some political mileage. Gasoline prices were on the rise, and Obama wanted to be all-things-to-all-people. …
“… consider why the United States has decided to encourage people to buy electric vehicles: It’s a new technology….”
– Samantha Page, “A Koch front group is putting out misleading attack ads on electric vehicles,” ThinkProgress, July 28, 2017.
“No electric car since 1902, regardless of battery or drive train, had been able to compete effectively against its contemporary internal combustion counterpart.”
– David Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and The Burden of History (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 203.
“When government tries to pick losers and winners, it typically picks losers. Why? Because in a free market, consumers pick winners to leave the losers for government.”
– R. Bradley, Electric Car Verdict: Another Government-Subsidized Bust, September 26, 2012.
The energy past is important–and far too few journalists and advocates in the energy-policy area know their history.…