“This is not an advocacy book…. (p. xi)
“[T]he single most important thing you can do is become politically active … and vote for politicians who support action on climate.” (p. 245)
In the Acknowledgements of Enron Ascending: The Forgotten Years (2018), I co-dedicated the book to a scholar and friend who crossed disciplines to advance our understanding of the real world. His intellectual trespassing benefited from diligence and fairness. I wrote: “Donald Lavoie taught me the value of scholarship in which opposing views are deeply understood, charitably interpreted, and thoroughly evaluated.”
This brings me to Andrew Dessler’s Introduction to Modern Climate Change (2nd edition: 2016, 3rd ed. in process). While this book is well organized, clearly written, and full of settled physical science, it fails the Lavoie Standard in the areas of unsettled climatology, history, and political economy.…
Continue Reading“With the very unique situation of CO2 (a global externality of positives and negatives), government mitigation is doomed to fail. Sooner or later, you will have to admit that politics failed, that fossil fuels were just too good given the alternatives of non-use, renewables, nuclear.” (Bradley to Dessler #1, August 3, 2019)
“We have not only market failure but also analytical failure (imperfect you, me, others) and government failure, which is magnified by 190 or so governments.” (Bradley to Dessler #2, August 3, 2019)
I have been critical of Texas A&M climatologist and Green New Dealer Andrew Dessler for some time now. He is far too certain about climate doom (“climate dystopia,” to use his term) and refuses to see the risks in climate policy, not only physical climate change.…
Continue Reading“[The Paris Accord] would have taken away our wealth…. We had to pay money to other countries that are very substantial countries. They wanted to take away your wealth. They didn’t want you to drill. They didn’t want you to frack. They didn’t want you to do steel.”
But what we want now is not independence; we want American energy dominance. Dominance
– President Donald Trump, August 13, 2019
At the construction site of Royal Dutch Shell’s Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex in western Pennsylvania last week, President Trump delivered an industrial speech that clearly distinguished his energy exceptionalism, energy dominance, energy optimism theme versus the climate-doom, keep-it-in-the-ground, Green-New-Deal worldview. The backdrop is Beaver County, Pennsylvania where a badly needed, long-awaited manufacturing revival is in process.
Shell Project
Shell’s multi-billion-dollar project will turn low-cost ethane from the Marcellus and Utica basins into polyethylene, a building block for many plastics.…
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