My least favorite think tank is Shikha Dalmia’s Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist. Left-funded and a pretend classical-liberal group, it promotes a vague ‘liberalism’. ISMA is a Trump-hate group of disaffected, politically homeless folk who have forgotten that statism is the enemy, not Donald Trump. Thus, they do not apply their metrics to the Progressive Left–just Trump. And their TDS has put them at odds with normal folk. [1]
This fringe group is a home to Left Libertarians who, among other things, play up climate alarmism and thus the Climate Industrial Complex’s forced energy transformation. Jonathan Adler, who I have taken to task (without his promised rebuttal), fits right in with Shikha’s group. Employing judicial activism, Adler assumes CO2 is a deleterious pollutant to argue for tort law for the ‘victims’ (fill in the blank) to sue the ‘guilty’ (everyone, really).…
Ed. Note: Four years ago, Storm Uri caused Texas’s centrally planned wholesale electricity market (ERCOT) to buckle, vindicating warnings about the state’s wind/solar reliance. The mainstream media implicated natural gas instead, failing to explore the why behind the why. Rather than deregulation, Texas has chosen to add wind, solar, and batteries, while subsidizing natural gas plants to counter intermittency. This duplicated grid is now driving rates up in a state that could have relied on surplus natural gas instead.
It was not so much the story of freak weather triggering a market failure writ large. It was a classic application of the political economy of government intervention: the seen and the unseen, expert/regulatory failure, and unintended consequences.
Don Lavoie, a preeminent thinker in the field of market-versus-government planning, once warned:
…If the guiding agency is less knowledgeable than the system it is trying to guide—and even worse, if its actions necessarily result in further undesired consequences in the working of that system—then what is going on is not planning at all but, rather, blind interference by some agents with the plans of others.”
“I will debate you on the condition that we hold the debate in the form of a WWE professional wrestling match, because that’s about as seriously as I take you.” (- Benjamin Leffel to author, below)
Benjamin Leffel, Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy and Leadership, University of Nevada Las Vegas, posted on LinkedIn (with this link to Science magazine).
Dear foundations and philanthropies:
Thousands of high-impact research grant proposals are being pressured to change their language for fear of angering the Trump regime. Many researchers will be looking to foundations instead of federal sources like NSF as a result. Now is your time to shine.
I commented on his post:
…Yes! End federal grants and spare the taxpayer! Climate scientists should be more amenable to doing controversial projects that are less alarmist or even pro-CO2.