Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has come right out and said it: The Green New Deal will require a government takeover of the US energy industries. As reported by Sam Dorman of Fox News:
The “Green New Deal” proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., seeks a complete transition to “energy efficiency” and “sustainable energy” — much of which would be owned and administered by the federal government.
During an appearance on MSNBC Thursday [August 22nd], Sanders told host Chris Hayes that the U.S. needed an “aggressive” federal approach to producing electricity and nodded after Hayes claimed he proposed a “federal takeover of the whole thing.”
Sanders agreed with Hayes’ assessment that he wanted to create a “Tennessee Valley Authority [TVA] extension for the whole country.” “You can’t nibble around the edges anymore,” Sanders added.
“For once I agree with Bernie Sanders,” stated Eric Worrall at WUWT.…
“Discoveries, like resources, may well be infinite: the more we discover, the more we are able to discover.” (Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2, p. 82)
“The world is not ‘a bundle of hay’ but a living growing complex of matter and energy, a process rather than a thing.” ( Erich Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries, 1951, p. 815.
What explains the happy fact (really the miracle of man) that the more we discover, the more we find out if left to discover? Instead of mineral depletion, we have mineral expansion–turning the Malthusian predicament on its head. And instead of weather/climate doom, we have successful adaptation in wealthy (as in healthy) free economies.
Labor Day has passed, a day that could be renamed Energy Day for the saved labor that modern energy has transferred to machines and appliances.…
This continues my three-part review of Andrew Dessler’s primer on the physical science and political economy of climate change, Introduction to Modern Climate Change (2nd edition: 2016).
Part I, “Suggestions for More Interdisciplinary Scholarship, Less Advocacy,” brought attention to the uneven treatment of issues in science, economics, and public policy that tainted the primer. I questioned the Deep Ecology assumption of optimal nature, wherein, according to Dessler, “any change in climate, either warming or cooling, will result in overall negative outcomes for human society” (p. 146).
This seems exactly wrong in our interglacial period when climate-related fatalities have fallen dramatically and agricultural production has soared thanks to warmth but particularly to fossil-fueled capitalism. Incentives and wealth have proven more than a match for the vicissitudes of weather and climate. As Alex Epstein (The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, pp.…