If Texas A&M scientists calculated that an asteroid was heading our way, we would likely head for the hills with a lot of pills. But when this university’s climatology department warns of dangerous man-induced global warming and calls for government action (think new taxes and regulation), roll your eyes and watch the wallet. [But] we live in a postmodern world where emotion and desire substitute for humility and scholarship.
– Robert Bradley, “Political Scientists: Gerald North and Andrew Dessler Double Down on Climate Alarmism,” October 11, 2013.
Andrew Dessler is an alarmist/activist climate scientist. He is very certain of his positions on the hard science questions (what Judith Curry warns is really an uncertainty monster). Dessler also veers outside of his expertise to confidently assess the prospects for (government) forced energy transformation away from fossil fuels, the area of political economy. …
“Increasing the affordability of both U.S. and global energy is an important economic and humanitarian objective. Policy makers heeding the time-honored healer’s maxim, ‘First, do no harm,’ should reject policies to tax and regulate away mankind’s access to affordable energy.”
It is titled Free to Prosper: Energy and Environment: A Pro-Growth Agenda for the 116th Congress. It is the work of the energy and environmental stalwarts at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the organization long led by Fred L. Smith Jr. and now directed by Kent Lassman. And as always, it is reliable scholarship to inform both sides of the political aisle.
The energy White Paper is part of a broader book, Free to Prosper. The eight areas other than Energy and Environment are Regulatory Reform and Agency Oversight; Trade; Banking and Finance; Private and Public Lands; Technology and Telecommunications; Labor and Employment; Food, Drugs, and Consumer Freedom; and Transportation That’s a lot of the federal matrix of public policy.…
“I am not claiming any great originality for the Lake County Experiment [on rural electrification in 1910]. If I had not hit upon it somebody else would have, but it is rather an interesting sidelight that even the opponents of private ownership, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, by their work have put the stamp of approval on such matters….”
– Samuel Insull, The Memoirs of Samuel Insull (1934), p. 97.
[Ed. note: This post is taken from the author’s Edison to Enron (2011), chapter 3, pp. 105–108]
“The way Insull’s utility managed Chicago’s power load,” noted one technological historian, “is comparable to the historic managerial contributions made by railway men in the nineteenth century and is as interesting as the widely publicized managerial concepts and policies of John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford.”…