“Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the [twentieth] century.”
Doom and gloom—and subsequent real-world falsification—hallmark the long career of John P. Holdren, neo-Malthusian and President Obama’s beginning-to-end science advisor.
Halloween Holdren has been quiet about the outlandish in recent years because he does not want to embarrass his boss. But his many statements, beginning in the early 1970s, never disowned, remain for the record.
Today is a good time to refresh our memories of the man who just might be the scariest presidential advisor in U.S. history!
Read—but don’t be frightened. The sky-is-falling gloom of Holdren, his mentor Paul Ehrlich, and others is in intellectual and empirical trouble. From Julian Simon to Bjorn Lomborg to Indur Goklany to Matt Ridley to Marlo Lewis to Alex Epstein, the technological optimists have the upper hand in a debate that continues to rage.…
“A carbon tax is hardly a genuine market solution analogous to other introductions of property rights.”
“Libertarians and conservatives in particular should not simply trust the assurances from the advocates of a carbon tax but should instead read the relevant literature themselves. In both theory and practice, a U.S. carbon tax remains a very dubious policy proposal.” (p. 21)
A new study by the Cato Institute usefully brings together arguments from physical science and social science to demonstrate that giving government a new area of taxation is fraught with difficulty. In one sense it is a cure worse than the disease; in another sense it is an open sesame for growing government–and a punitive weapon against a ‘politically incorrect’ industry, coal first, oil second, natural gas third.
Robert P. Murphy is a research assistant professor at Texas Tech University and senior economist at the Institute for Energy Research.…
“How could Clinton make money when people on average lose? There are two possibilities: She may have been incredibly lucky. Or it may have been fixed that she would gain and not lose. Neither possibility reflects well on her.”
“[T]he investment records of commodities between 1900 and 1975 … showed that the investor would have lost spectacularly by buying and holding commodities; AAA bonds produced a rate of return 733 per cent higher than holding resources.”
- Julian Simon: 1996 (below)
Remember the Clinton commodity-investment home run back in 1994? One thousand dollars increased one-hundred-fold in ten months of trading. Some of the facts were reported at the time by the Washington Post:
…Hillary Rodham Clinton was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released yesterday.