Air Pollution Control vs. CO2: Common Sense, not Malthusianism

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- January 7, 2025

Richard McCann (Ph.D), co-founder and senior consultant in energy, water, and environmental policy at M.Cubed, is a regular critic of my posts and comments on social media. Here is an exchange that flushes out Malthusianism (really neo-Malthusianism) in the climate debate for the record.

Bradley: Failure: Kyoto Protocol to Paris Accord. End the futile, wasteful anti-CO2 crusade.

McCann: Here’s why we can’t let this rest: https://mcubedecon.com/2025/10/15/modern-climate-change-is-now-18-times-faster-than-historic-global-warming-mass-extinction-events/

Bradley: So tired, so wrong. Malthusian studies are garbage in-garbage out. Statism is the problem, not CO2 enrichment.

McCann: Please show how its wrong. This is no more “Malthusian” than the air pollution studies of the 1960s that has led to much improved air quality across the county and even the world. Even Churchill agreed in the 1950s that coal burning needed to end in London because of the consequences.…

CO2 Enrichment is Winning!

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- January 4, 2025

…

Toward a Free Market Electricity Policy

By Robert Bradley Jr. --

Milton Friedman once said (1982: xxvii):

“There is an enormous inertia–a tyranny of the status quo–in private and particularly governmental arrangements. Only a crisis-actual or perceived-produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

I remembered this quotation when Michael Giberson, a classical liberal caught in an interventionist web, stated:

Bradley: I answered your question about what a free market in electricity is. I’m still waiting for yours….

Giberson: I must have missed it. In your comments referencing your econlib posts on Texas you list some laws to be repealed to help get the industry headed more to a free market, but that’s a discussion of means rather than ends.…