“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could scientifically determine the cumulative costs or benefits that result over the next three hundred years from our choices in the present? It may be nice, but it is impossible. ”
“Because [mainstream climate] models produced such wildly different results depending on the projections and assumptions baked in the mathematical cake, economist Robert Pindyck concluded after an extensive review of such models that they are so badly flawed as to make them virtually useless for policy.”
When former President Obama wanted to curtail carbon dioxide emissions, he instructed his economic advisors to construct a way to calculate their effect on society. The metric adopted by the EPA to guide them in their quest to regulate the economy is a metric called the “social cost of carbon” (SCC).…
Continue Reading““If environmental alarmists ever wonder why more people haven’t come around to their way of thinking, it isn’t because people like me occasionally voice doubts in newspaper op-eds. It’s because too many past predictions of imminent disaster didn’t come to pass. That isn’t because every alarm is false — many are all too real — but because our Promethean species has shown the will and the wizardry to master the challenge, at least when it’s been given the means to do so.”
– Bret Stephens, “Apocalpyse Not.” New York Times, February 8, 2018.
“[Julian] Simon found that humanity progressed not only by solving immediate problems within the existing institutional framework but also by creatively improving the framework over time. . . . In the short run, members of society adopt localized technical and contractual fixes.
The fossil-fuel energy era is not waning. Quite the opposite; it is still young.
For decades, activists have been trying to convince the American people that declining resources would forever make us dependent on expensive foreign oil. But according to a new report from the Institute for Energy Research (IER) on North America’s energy resources, that line of thinking is flat-out false. Based on the latest official statistics, domestic oil, natural gas, and coal deposits are much more extensive than commonly realized.
The real problem is that much of our resources are not being developed because of antiquated, heavy-handed government regulations. As a consequence, the American economy is being deprived of significant job creation and new investments.
Consider this. Total recoverable oil in North America exceeds 1.7 trillion barrels, which is more oil than the entire world has used over the last 150 years.…
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