“The business voices change, the decades change, but the arguments are familiar. Problem is, the global average temperature today is not appreciably higher than when Ken Lay penned his op-ed. The year 1998 would be the temperature peak, in fact, that marked the beginning of ‘the pause‘.”
Henry Paulson began his recent New York Times opinion-page editorial, “The Coming Climate Crash,” as follows:
“There is a time for weighing evidence and a time for acting. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my work in finance, government and conservation, it is to act before problems become too big to manage.”
Ken Lay ended his Houston Chronicle opinion-page editorial of December 5, 1997, “Let’s Have an Ounce of Global-Warming Prevention,” [1] similarly:
…“It’s time to stop debating the issues surrounding climate change initiatives and focus instead on simple, realistic, cost-effective solutions.
“Come to fabulous Las Vegas to meet leading scientists from around the world who question whether ‘man-made global warming’ will be harmful to plants, animals, or human welfare. Learn from top economists and policy experts about the real costs and futility of trying to stop global warming.”
The leading sustainability threat is not mineral resource depletion, air or water pollution, or anthropogenic climate change. It is statism, and in the case of climate change, policy activism in the name of “stabilizing” or “saving” the planet.
Enter the Heartland Institute and their 9th International Conference on Climate Change, to be held July 7–9 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Consider the conference in the background of the “pause” in global warming, which is 15-years-going-on-20 as shown in the graph below.…
“Enron was a political colossus with a unique range of rent-seeking and subsidy-receiving operations. Ken Lay’s announced visions for the company—to become the world’s first natural-gas major, then the world’s leading energy company, and, finally, the world’s leading company—relied on more than free-market entrepreneurship. They were premised on employing political means to catch up with, and outdistance, far larger and more-established corporations.
– R. Bradley, “Enron: The Perils of Interventionism,” EconLib, September 3, 2012.
A debate is currently playing out over the future of the Import-Export Bank, which comes up for Congressional reauthorization this September. In “End Corporate Welfare? Start With the Ex-Im Bank,” Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, a free-market advocacy group, pin-pricked the notion that small business was the beneficiary of taxpayer-guaranteed loans.…